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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

>>antiquated laws

...Rejuvenated. These are new. There's a new common ground around puritanism. The philosophical underpinnings have changed. Women's rights are, ostensibly, protected while the client side is criminalalised. The reason for the laws is no longer "public morals," it's consent.

However, we arrive at more or less the same place. Increasingly, bishops and feminists find common ground on these issues...

Imo, even legalization isn't enough. We need normalisation. While prostition is marginalized and ostrecized, sex workers will be at the bottom of the pyramid.

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Bravo. This is the natural product of a culture that paradoxically wants to be sex positive for women but also sex negative for men. The outcomes are surprisingly similar to what happens to a culture that's sex negative for women and sex positive for men.

I wonder how much day to day violence would be reduced if prostitution was normalized. How much violence is a result of internalized sexual frustration without an outlet.

I would hazard a guess that it wouldn't improve.

The kinds of people involved in violence are overwhelmingly poor, young males. This is not a group that cares about laws or cultural norms. They lack the money to pay for sex workers, they don't have cultural hangups about it. They lack the money, education, and human decency to maintain a girlfriend relationship.

Which is to say they're not bad people because they're sexually frustrated. They're sexually frustrated because they're bad people. Which can be a negative feedback cycle.

How about those at the margin? I'd guess most policy proposals don't seem productive when you condense a population down to a scalar "model" subject and ask if he would change his behavior in light of the new policy. That doesn't mean that population-level effects won't be observed.

I'm going to guess the effect would be marginal :)

If you want to address violence it would be better to focus on reducing poverty, on education, and on rehabilitation. A lot of violence is drug related, providing a legal market for buying and selling illegal drugs would kill that element crime. Prohibition of drugs seems to be playing out the same that prohibition of alcohol did. Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.

Normalizing prostitution is not likely to move the needle for the reasons I mentioned.

I can’t reply to eloff directly but you are wrong, which is why we should base law on hard numbers and not „guesses“.

If prostitution has to be done at places with security guards it wouldn't be a big issue though, she just screams and the guy gets thrown out and possibly charged/arrested.

Screaming might not be enough...

For a security guard sitting in the corridor outside to hear you? Definitely it would.

That is a BS argument. Sexual frustration is the norm, rather than the exception, and if somebody commits a rape to act out sexual desires, then it is not because he didn't have access to prostitutes. I doubt there are a lot of people who frequent prostitutes as much as most couples have sex in a relationship...

However, honestly "voluntary" prostitution is also too expensive. Which is a big reason for the famed "management level" to exist. Through drugs, physical and psychological abuse they create a much cheaper supply, and only that way the demand can be met.

> if somebody commits a rape to act out sexual desires, then it is not because he didn't have access to prostitutes

I'd argue this is precisely the person who should not have access to prostitutes. Their existence, or our inability to adequately police them, is one of the stronger arguments against prostitution.

internalized sexual frustration without an outlet

Unless we’re talking about hi-class hi-paid workers here, which are far from common, this “outlet” has the same (or even lower) voltage than your hand-y discharger, if you get the analogy.

The more realistic result will be you and your kids living amidst endless brothels and their frustrated clients.

Plenty of violence is commited by men who have sexual partners. Also, violent men do commit violence againta their sexual partners.

In Sweden there are plenty of "yoni dearmouring" and similar sevices. I get that more women have a harder time orgasming than men usually have. Also more trauma amongst women than men.

But if you are a man with these kinds of problems you have nowhere to go.

Yep, I am in the UK. Prostitution/brothels are nominally legal where I am (and have been for three decades) but they began cracking down recently. Religious groups allied with violence against women charities. This has been with mixed success because legalization was introduced to combat HIV, and the local govt is loathe to turn this back completely because it will cause chaos (lots of job losses, increase in pimping, human trafficking). But there is a new puritanism.

Yup. 1999,to be precise.

An interesting way to test whether it is a victimless crime is to pay prostitutes $100,000 and to see how quickly they return to the profession. One possible theory is that prostitution is a victim of poverty.

Sure, but are you willing to apply the same test to every other job and outlaw the ones that fail?

Maybe not what GP was getting at, but I would like to structure society so that people don't have to spend big chunks of their lives doing menial jobs in order to afford their basic needs!

More automation. Menial jobs still need to get done.

Pay the menial jobs better. The person cleaning the toilets at Facebook should earn more than the developers there.

EDIT: This is not meant literally, I am not talking about toilette cleaning jobs at Facebook, I am talking about paying people for the time they spent working and maybe how physically taxing or unpleasant the work is. This is in contrast to paying people what you can get away with because of the available supply of workers or how much money you have to throw around because you can get it from your customers.

Then you would have millions of people applying for a few thousand jobs. How would you decide who gets to work there and earn those salaries? Facebook does it by reducing the salary bit by bit until the number of people who wants to work there is roughly as many as they need.

I don't think you've tried very hard to figure out ways to decide. The obvious one is lottery, but there are many more.

I'll note that lots of people want FB developer jobs, but they don't solve that problem by cutting salaries until the number of applicants is roughly equal to the number of jobs. It's a tell that you use one hiring heuristic for people in your social class and a different one for people seen as lesser. That's a great illustration of the overall problem that the original article is part of.

A lottery doesn't feel very fair though, does it? Why should a few people get paid more for the same work? Doesn't make sense.

>>> Pay the menial jobs better. The person cleaning the toilets at Facebook should earn more than the developers there.

>> I don't think you've tried very hard to figure out ways to decide. The obvious one is lottery, but there are many more.

> A lottery doesn't feel very fair though, does it? Why should a few people get paid more for the same work? Doesn't make sense.

A lottery is about the fairest way to distribute a scarce resource imaginable. And it seems even less fair to declare that everyone whose job is to clean toilets should continue to get equally crappy wages, while there's massive inequality in income all over the place.

That is such a stupid argument, lottery is one of the worst way to distribute a scarce resource. It is better to split it up and pay everyone dividends rather than give a few the whole thing. In the case of Facebook we would tax it to hell so everyone could share, not do a damn lottery so a few janitors can get rich. Of course that is if you are in the "distribute resources to the people camp", but I see no reason why a lottery would ever be the right thing to do here no matter what camp you are in, it isn't like the world would be better off if we had a lottery of who gets to inherit the billions of dollars the 0.0001% owns rather than distribute it.

So in short, the right thing to do is either leave facebook as is, or tax it so that neither its software engineers nor its janitors can earn much more than an average American.

> That is such a stupid argument, lottery is one of the worst way to distribute a scarce resource. It is better to split it up and pay everyone dividends rather than give a few the whole thing.

Not every resource is divisible or practically divisible (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon).

You're kind of going all over the place to dispute everyone's points. If Facebook were to pay its toilet cleaners far above the market rate for that job, a fair way to solve the problem of "who gets these jobs" in the face of a glut of qualified applicants is by using a lottery.

You're right there's all kinds of other things that may be better to do, but we were talking about this specific artificial scenario.

As I said, I don't think you've tried very hard. I am not going to name all the possibilities one at a time.

If unfairness in jobs and compensation is what really motivates you, there are much bigger fish to fry than some totally imaginary jobs that will never exist.

Just pick the one you consider most qualified, there is no need to have the number of applicants match the number of jobs. But this is actually besides my point which is that even though menial jobs are often the harder, more unpleasant, or whatever jobs they are also often the worst payed for jobs because there is an oversupply of workers and this is used against them.

Economic theory might try to tell you that the low wages will incentivize people to seek better jobs which will reduce the supply of workers for menial jobs which will eventually get you a developer salary for cleaning toilettes, but as far as I can tell that is not what is actually happening.

My understanding of fair payment is not what you can get away with because of the supply and demand situation, it is that if you put eight hour of your life time into your work, then you deserve being paid for that time more or less no matter what you do.

Why should some workers gets paid vastly more than others for the same job? That isn't sustainable at all. Most places that hires janitors can't afford to pay anyone at the company even close to what facebook pays its engineers, it doesn't make sense that a few privileged janitors gets facebook engineering salary when most of them gets a small fraction of that.

People who comes up with those arguments just haven't thought things through.

Lets separate two things, what is fair payment on the one hand and on the other hand how this might be achieved. For the first question I already stated my position, I think it is unfair to have the supply and demand situation heavily affect your wage, especially if an oversupply of workers is used to lower wages for hard or unpleasant jobs.

For the second question I will admit that my initial comment sounds like it is an easy thing to do but you are right that I can not provide some policies that if implemented would yield my desired outcome. But you should also not take my comment to literally, I do not want a better wage for the janitors at Facebook but for menial work in general. So as a first step at least have a minimum wage that ensures that you are not living at the verge of poverty if you work full time. That is certainly a far cry from achieving what my initial comment asked for but it is better than nothing and as I said, I unfortunately do not know how to get there.

The problem with that is if you don't let the supply and demand price be the price, you create other issues. Like what to do about the excess or undersupply of whatever you are looking at.

I'm not denying that the price can seem wrong. Who really thinks that sports stars ought to make 20x what a doctor makes?

The problem is in my opinion that the price fulfills too many tasks at once, it is a measure of work and resources required for the production of goods, it is used as measure of value or utility a consumer assigns to the goods, it is used to decide how goods of limited supply are distributed, and there may be more things upon careful inspection. The problem is that those aspects do not align in a good way all the time and that there are no or no strong enough forces to fix this.

Look at pay scales in the former Soviet Union. In demand workers were still paid more but the state guaranteed a job for everyone and poverty was quite low - and average difference between a well-to-do person and a working class person was not huge (though I guess the living arrangements back then could be considered "poverty" today). Labor / Other salaries are always a choice (although the USSR experienced lots of brain drain because of their choices, so maybe it doesn't work too well with open borders)

(even though there were many other problems, and eventually the planned economy bit and large foreign-denominated loans backed by plummeting oil made the whole thing collapse like a house of cards)

This sounds to me exactly like a nice-sounding in the short-term but ultimately unsustainable system to me. That some of the most anti-socialist places in the world are ex-territories of the soviet union doesn't give me much confidence in the soviet way there.

> How would you decide who gets to work there and earn those salaries?

Pick the first person that applies who has seen a toilet before in their life and is physically able to clean one.

Costs. Facebook cannot replace a developer’s desk with auto-development station, but it definitely can do that to a toilet room. The only reason a toilet cleaner has a job is that they are cheap. If it was paid $300k/yr per floor, anyone at FB would automate floor mopping and sanitizer spraying in few weeks, if not rethink a toilet room completely.

(Which isn’t a bad idea given how much of ancient legacy shit we are still dragging in this area.)

Cut the salary of everyone by 5% and you can have one cleaner for every 20 developers. My point is simply that work should not be cheap, if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life, otherwise it is just a mild form of slavery.

if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life

I agree, humanely. But our entire competitive all-eating-optimizing nature works against this.

Raising min.wages would likely lead to the situation where they have no job at all, because if low-paid jobs were enforced as decently paid by law, companies would simply automate them. They didn’t do that yet, only because it’s cheap to use human labor. Taxi, delivery, cleaning, you name it.

If low skill job workers could get $$$$$$ jobs, they would. But they can’t, for various reasons. This is not fixable at the level we discussing.

https://www.google.ru/search?q=raising+minimum+wage+increase...

I essentially agree with you but I think this not an argument against raising the minimum wage. They will not lose their jobs, they already do not have a job. Ignoring the facet of work as self-fulfillment or being part of society or whatever, the relevant part of a job for a worker is that it earns them a living wage, not that they do some work. In that sense someone with a job not earning them a living wage is already jobless.

And if we actually run out of jobs valued at least a living wage for some part of society - and I have no illusion that everyone can become a developer if they just tried hard enough - then this is a problem that needs addressing. Just pretending that there are still jobs because there is work that is valued less than a living wage but still more expensive then automation, is not a solution.

But I am not in a position to really judge objectively where we are, whether we are already out of jobs or whether some jobs are just underpaid because it is possible in the current market situation, or what mix of the former.

How do you prosecute poverty? Does poverty lose by default and you award the victim damages?

You can do the same cash experiment with most office workers and the effects might surprise you. You can say garbage management jobs, sweeping streets or even bureaucratic positions are the result of one's poverty.

Just leave the god damned people alone, its sad that in 21st century some folks still feel above the rest of us and try to push their moral views unto everybody else.

If you give someone who works fast food 100k are the going to go back to fast food? Not really a meaningful test as the vast majority of retail level jobs would fail it.

What if some people just like working in sex work?

Big if, some may enjoy it. Sky Rojo on Netflix might change your mind.

Some people don't enjoy work, period either. That doesn't mean that having a job should be illegal.

Prostitutes are paid a lot since the number of men who are interested in casual sex is a lot more than the number of women. Then the pay goes up so much that many women who aren't originally interested in casual sex also starts to engage in it, just because men value it so much. So one way to reduce the number of "victims" would be to put a max cap on how much you are allowed to pay prostitutes, that way women wouldn't do it as an easy way to earn money. Because paying women too much for sex hurts them apparently.

> Prostitutes are paid a lot

That's not a fair generalization. Most sex workers remain in poverty, and it's extremely risky work -- for all that men's rights activists like to talk about men having the most dangerous jobs, their statistics are drawn from a perspective that sex work isn't a "job" -- so the actual #1 most dangerous job, mostly done by women, is overlooked.

Even in places like Canada were the work is decriminilized and clients are criminalized, sex workers rarely go to the police after being attacked or raped because the common response is that the worker "asked for it." Sex workers are freelancers: they don't get insurance or other benefits, so they need to charge a higher rate up-front.

Rather than limit the amount that sex workers get paid, it would be better to legalize it and treat it like any other job. Forced labor (pimps and sex trafficking) is already illegal; those laws just need enforcement, which will be easier with the transparency of legal employment. Also, individual workers and brothels can get insurance, medical and otherwise, hire security, etc. to improve the safety of workers.

Let the free market sort out the price.

If they weren't paid a lot you wouldn't have a problem since these women would just go and work at McDonalds instead to earn their money.

And if they remain in poverty even when being paid a lot they either work very few hours or they spend it on luxury goods like clothes or trips.

Edit: Anyway, the argument isn't that prostitutes are victims because there is a lot of violence related to the profession. The argument is usually that it is inhumane to subject a woman to involuntary sex, so women accepting money to have sex they otherwise wouldn't is seen as a bad thing for the woman even under perfect conditions. That is the main argument why sex work should be illegal, everything else can be fixed but that can't ever be fixed no matter how much you improve surroundings. I don't agree with that view, but that is what you are up against.

Well, in fairness, the few prostitues I've seen downtown where I live all seem to be meth addicts or crackheads, not super employable. I would assume your high end super desirable escorts make far more money and are subject to far less danger

Sounds like the problem here is drug addiction and not prostitution.

>That's not a fair generalization.

You're nitpicking. You know they meant "a lot relative to the qualifications and difficulty of the job"

If something is illegal and people still do it to make a living you can be pretty much assured it's better than all the legal menial labor options.

> You're nitpicking. You know they meant "a lot relative to the qualifications and difficulty of the job"

No I'm not, and yes I know that, and I addressed it, but I'll spell it out some more.

Just about everybody is qualified to collect garbage, too. Garbage collection is physically risky and also disgusting and stigmatized. Like sex work, pay should compensate for those factors. Just because some people also voluntarily pick garbage in parks doesn't mean that garbage collection should be free.

The fact that sex work is illegal introduces additional risk to the workers, which, again, should increase its price. But, statistically, the highly paid sex workers are very uncommon. And that's not nitpicking; it's observing that OC is cherrypicking.

And anybody who thinks "sex is fun" and that comparing sex work to garbage collection is unfair has probably never done sex work nor had a serious conversation with somebody who has.

It is not nitpick. Prostitutes earn less then pretty much anyone on this forum. It does not pay as much as people assume.

And it has considerable risks, partially because they cant legally hire security.

> for all that men's rights activists like to talk about men having the most dangerous jobs, their statistics are drawn from a perspective that sex work isn't a "job" -- so the actual #1 most dangerous job, mostly done by women, is overlooked

By that token you'd also have to count "gangster" as a job, which is probably also pretty dangerous.

Furthermore, the entire notion that sex work is dangerous for women is exactly the reason it's widely prohibited in the first place.

If the issue is that it’s dangerous for women, then why do the lawmakers write laws that make sex work even more dangerous. It’s hypocritical nonsense pushed by religious groups.

I bet > 95% of all working people on earth would quite their current job if you gave them $100,000.

Is $100,000 supposed to be some kind of ‘set for life’ amount of money?

Nope

It's supposed to be a "solve immediate problems and buy time and/or education to find a better job" amount of money.

Not enough that you can retire but enough that you don't have to worry about making ends meet for long enough to pivot to something else.

It is enough to quit your job for many years, go study something, travel, or just take a break and try to pivot to a different kind of life.

It's enough buffer to make reasonable changes so as to get a more desirable profession if that is your goal, whether that's training for new skills, moving to a different location with better prospects, getting treatment for addictions, etc.

This works with almost every job.

I mean, if you gave a janitor $100,000 in cash would they come into scrub your toilet again tomorrow? Does that mean hiring a janitor is a crime with a victim?

Most everybody would behave differently if they had substantially more money. I know I wouldn't be working where I am if I didn't need a paycheck. But choosing a shittier job because it pays better is not victimization.

> Imo, even legalization isn't enough. We need normalisation.

Many of the FAANG companies are famous for their perks. One of those is having massage therapists at the office. By normalization, do you mean you would you be ok them also having sex workers (well paid with benefits) as well.

Just to be clear, I, and likely most people, would be against that, which shows that I don't think sex work is going to be completely normalized.

I think one could easily imagine that sex work could be given a similar treatment like legal Marijuana. Obviously there are differences in these (for lack of a more useful word) 'vices,' but "normalization" for marijuana in the US does not mean free weed edibles as part of your comp package. It means it's shunned/controlled/a sort of deal breaker in professional settings, but more and more understood to be a choice people can make with their free time outside of work as long as it's safe, legal, etc...

But you are talking about legalization, not normalization.

At many companies, it is pretty normal for there to be alcohol, even at work related events. I doubt, even if marijuana were made legal, that you would see marijuana at work related events.

There is a big difference between legalization and normalization.

One way you can think of normalization is with regards to its status in a professional setting. If you mentioned around the water cooler that you went to a nail salon and had a pedicure, no one would care. If you mentioned that you went to legal sex worker, you would have an HR complaint filed against you. One is normalized, the other is not.

I don't think sex in general will ever really be "normalized". It will always involve taboos of some sort.

By normalization I mean a social/cultural change, not necessarily a legal one... though the two are linked.

I mean a culture where being a sex worker is not something that most people hide or gasp at. Strippers are, in some places, semi-"normal." You can date an ex stripper, in some circles. Ex-prostitute is, generally, a no-go.

>>I, and likely most people, would be against that

Yes of course. That's what not being normalized currently means. Normalisation would be a change in these opinions. Homosexuality was also "most people against" very recently.

Also, I didn't say that I think this change is coming. Quite the opposite. The current trend is in the puritanical direction.

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