The operating cost of adult and gambling startups
orchidfiles.com
orchidfiles.com
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.
But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction.
Which is a good thing! This is an area full of scammers, if you can't set up your business legally, I'm very happy to hear it's more difficult for you to advertise it.
Making drugs illegal does not eliminate demand, but it absolutely curbs it. The converse is also true, for example legalizing cannabis in Canada has significantly increased demand for it [1]. While it's true cannabis use had been gradually increasing for decades prior to legalization, there was a significant spike afterwards which has since levelled off.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/231016/dq231...
The relevant thing that link actually says is that more survey respondents admitted to cannabis use after legalization, the obvious problem being that before legalization they would be admitting to a crime, which will suppress response rates.
The same link also points out that the legalization happened right before COVID and then you have a major confounder because even if cannabis use is actually up, you don't know if it's because of legalization or people turning to cannabis over stress from COVID. Moreover, the reported usage increased during COVID but started to decline in 2023. This implies that either the apparent spike was COVID, or that it was something like media reports about recent legalization acting as temporary free advertising and causing a temporary increase in usage. Neither of those is evidence of a sustained increase in demand.
Meanwhile legal options do cause people to prefer legal sources over the black market, and then you get fewer people becoming addicts because the thing they thought they were buying was spiked with something significantly more addictive by a black market seller. Or the black market products have higher variation in the dose and then customers can't predict how much they're getting and occasionally take more than expected, leading to a higher rate of overdose and stronger dependency-inducing withdrawal.
In the case of cannabis it's been showing to lead to less underage use too. 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.
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.
If the benefit of doing the crime is a million dollars and the penalty is a 50% chance of a year in prison then you have a problem, because plenty of people would be willing to take the risk. But it's actually worse than that, because spending $100,000 on countermeasures might lower the risk of getting caught to 1%, and they're still making $900,000. That might not be worth it when the penalty is a year -- maybe $100,000 in profit is worth a 50% risk of one year? But if you set the penalty to 20 years then it is. Then the gain is $900,000 but the expected penalty has actually fallen to 1% of 20 years, i.e. expected cost of 2.4 months instead of 6. To deter someone with a $900,000 profit who values a year at $120,000 with a 1% chance of getting caught, you would need the penalty to be 750 years, which you can't do because people don't live that long. And spending even more on countermeasures might lower the risk of getting caught even more. If spending $500,000 makes it 0.1%, that may not be worth doing when the max practical penalty is ~70 years, but the option for it means that even 750 years would be insufficient even if it was possible.
This is why there are things it's very difficult to deter. The profit from doing them is more than the cost of making the probability of detection small and then the size of the penalty can't be made large enough to be a deterrent.
That all changes when you legalize most of the market. Now the profit isn't a million dollars, it's $100,000, because anyone can enter the market so increased competition drives down margins. Moreover, $90,000 of the profit was from selling to adults. So now the profit from selling to kids is only $10,000. Not worth spending $100,000 to lower the risk of getting caught. And then you can easily assign a moderate penalty that acts as an actual deterrent.
What if the penalty for selling drugs to kids was death?
It seems like that would change the risk/reward calculation pretty substantially.
You could hypothetically try to make the difference in the penalties larger by making the penalty for selling to adults smaller, e.g. a $10 fine, so that there is minimal incentive to pay for countermeasures when selling to adults and thereby have them already paid for and in place when selling to kids. But then you're just de facto legalizing selling to adults and trying not to admit it.
For dealers this would mean almost nothing when the punishment for dealing already lead people to do things like get in shootouts with police.
Meanwhile legalization of some drugs has directly shown that it decreases youth usage.
I think you're getting at something valid, but it isn't quite what you think.
The punishment for dealing drugs is, as I understand it, mostly applied to major distributors. In this sense, selling drugs wasn't a crime before anyway.
If you're too low-level for prosecution to be much of a concern, it doesn't take much to guide you away from fundamentally similar crimes where prosecution is a real concern.
>The relevant thing that link actually says is that more survey respondents admitted to cannabis use after legalization, the obvious problem being that before legalization they would be admitting to a crime, which will suppress response rates.
Sure, except Canada had legal medicinal weed since 2001 and everyone was aware that police attitudes towards it were very lax. There were even technically-illegal weed stores that the Canadian government took years to shut down. The number of people that lied to a pollster because they thought that the government would get them was almost certainly minimal. The fact that the trend is pretty smooth before/after the boundary confirms this.
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.
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.
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.
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-order, to be a workable, safe and reasonably fair business. Scarne started out his career, as a magician and card mechanic, as a sort of consultant who could keep games fair.
Blacks in New York City, for instance, ran illegal street craps and ran a lottery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game
quite similar to the "Pick 3" games you see in many states -- the latter got taken over by the Italian mafia.
Gambling has a broad cross-cultural appeal and some people are going to do it no matter how you try to shut it down. In the US we went from having a few centers to widespread "riverboat" and tribal gambling to widespread casinos now to mobile gambling on sports and sometimes the equivalent of video slots.
Of course there is the matter of degree. It's not going to wreck your life to drop $1 on the lottery a week and probably gives you more than $1 worth of fun. If you're addicted though it may be no fun at all. I can totally see where Nate Silver is coming from but I can also see the degenerate who drops 20 bets on a single game on the weekend as well as the person who thinks he is Nate Silver and he isn't. I think the Superbowl is a fair competition by player who are playing their hardest, but it breaks my heart as a sports fan when teams are not playing to win and that's why I can't stand watching the NBA despite loving going to second-tier college basketball games in person.
And for drugs? I remember all the Lester Grinspoon talk about how prohibition is worse than the drugs themselves and that might have been true before 2000 but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me -- but Marshall McLuhan said we are driving by looking in the rear view mirror and of course some people are going to be repeating things that were true in the last century.
Fentanyl is a response to prohibition. If you have to smuggle something it's a lot easier to move 10 kg of fentanyl and cut it with something near the point of sale than to move 10,000 kg of codeine from the point of manufacture.
But then you have street dealers cutting it with who knows what in who knows what amount. They may use a 1000:1 ratio of unspecified hopefully-inert powder to fentanyl but don't mix it evenly so some customers get a 10000:1 ratio and others get 100:1 and become addicted or overdose. Or a dealer has one supplier who was already cutting it 50:1 so they were used to only cutting it another 20:1 so their customers don't complain, but then they start wanting larger quantities and find a new supplier without realizing they just bypassed the one who was pre-cutting it and are now getting uncut fentanyl.
None of that happens if anyone can buy codeine at Walmart. Or for that matter if they can buy fentanyl and know exactly how much they're getting.
Illegal drugs get stronger for exactly the reason you stated in your first paragraph.
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.
Because its an addictive product. See also: gambling.
I don't know what it is, thats why I asked. Is the assertion that you're trying to make that drugs and gambling being addictive is a result of hormone imbalance in the addicts, rather than the addictive nature of those things?
The bans and strict regulations are the social safety features.
If gambling is illegal then the profits go to organized crime and they don't follow any of the other laws either.
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 their families.
And the companies in question break the law and then whine and complain like they shouldn't need to face the consequences; like the law shouldn't apply to them because they don't think it's fair.
This form of civil disobedience is effective against bad laws that nevertheless assign punishments proportional to the nominal offense. If "demonstrations without a permit" is punished by a week in jail and they won't give you a permit then you do the demonstration and spend the week in jail. A week later you're back out there demonstrating again. MLK Jr. was arrested 29 times in a span of 11 years.
It doesn't really work in the modern system which is tuned for coercing plea bargains and full of three strikes laws, because then "pissing off the government" is an aggravating factor that causes them to stack more charges until you're facing years instead of days. Then you're not making a point through a willingness to spend a few nights in a cell before your next press conference, you're getting taken off the board.
It also never really worked against bad economic rules because the nature of bad economic rules is to make good economic behavior uneconomical, like converting units to types in higher demand or funding new construction. The deleterious effect of the rule is that instead of it costing $50,000 to add a housing unit, it costs $500,000. But doing civil disobedience by building it anyway would catch you >$500,000 in fines and penalties, or carries penalties like demolition of the structure. So the bad law acts as an extremely effective deterrent against doing the good thing by making it uneconomical regardless of whether you follow the law or you don't. A bankrupt company can't continue to advocate for change or serve as an example of doing something good.
And if they actually did pay the fines then instead of people saying "that's not real civil disobedience" they would be saying "look at these lawless corporations paying token fines as a cost of doing business" and arguing for the penalties to be increased to a level that would bankrupt them wherever that isn't already the case.
So the remaining option is to break the law and then argue that the law is harmful and shouldn't be enforced.
That being said, I also dont think that civil disobedience means you have to accept whatever harsh punishment whatever authoritarian is using. It is actually ok to avoid those.
Do you truly believe this is some protest action by Airbnb? Because I think most of us rightly characterize it as "intentionally breaking the law for profit" and little more than that.
I'm not sure I like seeing their behavior compared to legitimate protests and activist work. That seems rather insulting to the people and organizations who actually take real risks for the public good. This is a silicon valley startup, a VC-funded profit machine disrupting communities around the world by breaking the law. To paint this as somehow altruistic is a novel take to say the least.
That said I mostly agree with your points. But why didn't cab companies innovate and provide us with the same service? A yellow spandex cover that converts any car into a cab, a points program giving discounts, a ride share app that carries 5 people who all ride the same route? They instead provided nothing, other than dirty cabs with bullet proof glass (in "gun free" zones nonetheless)
If people are getting priced out, that implies that either the cost of a unit is more than the cost of construction, or that the cost of construction is unreasonably high. If it's the first one the higher demand should just lead to more construction instead of higher prices, because units that sell for more than they cost to build are profitable to build and supply expands until the price falls below the cost. If it's the second one, the actual source of your problem is high regulatory costs and NIMBYism rather than AirBNB.
A mint we will then need to spend on bribes to ALPA. DoT is almost entirely captured now, so that's less of a problem.
In fact, here's a much better get-rich app / scheme: use AI to find regulatory situations that are both easy to break and profitable to break and where enforcement is usually just done to poor people. The Ubermaker. Why dig a gold mine when you can sell the shovels.
How about a less cynical alternative: Use it to find ways to defeat regulatory capture so that you can enter a large market which is currently locked up by incumbents, or make more in an ancillary market from doing "commoditize your complement" on the one which is currently captured.
Honest question: why is this line so clear for you?
The line is clear for some people right away. Other people have to see the effects first hand. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and the never-ending line of obviously poor people dropping nearly their entire paychecks on scratchoffs, then buying a case of beer was a formative memory for me. It most states, the lottery is just subsidizing the cost of education on the backs of the poor and uneducated and gambling-addicted so that they don't have to raise property taxes. And that's if the money actually gets spent on education. Sometimes they just turn into slushfunds for pet projects. It's gross.
We're talking about a product built to make people's lives worse while extracting wealth from them that get them addicted as well.
As much as I like a cold Coke (Coke >>> Pepsi :-) on a hot day, I also realize it's bad for me, and I'm drinking a lot more Spindrift these days. And despite the fact that I rarely drink more than say, 2 cans a day (i.e. I can generally control it), I would still vote to limit the amount of sugar in any beverage to like 1/10 that of Coke, just for general health reasons. Of course, then stores will probably see an uptick in sugar cube sales or something.. Gotta feed the addiction.
I don’t have an issue with people eating sugar, but it is not a necessary nutrient.
It just seems that you're arguing that without added, pure sugar in drinks/foods your body and brain would break down, but that would be factually incorrect*
*unless you're also suffering from some exceedingly rare genetic conditions affecting certain metabolic paths but it's unlikely you'd live to tell the story.
Is the line still clear?
In the UK for example the police got so defunded, damaged and wrecked, that they will straight out do their best to refuse investigating most crimes, eg robbery, burglary, assault, theft, even if you literally hand them evidence ("I saw my neighbour Tim doing that and I have CCTV", "my stolen bike is literally in that garage, I have tracker and I made it make a sound").
Police is so defunded and demoralised that they focus on arresting disabled and pensioners for opposing genocide and throw people into the jail for having a peaceful protest planning zoom call - for longer they would serve for rape.
So you tried to joke but in fact many crimes have been decriminalised.
That's most of the products being sold today, you think the most for-profit companies sell things and services in order to improve the world? They're selling stuff because they want to make money, if they can make someone addicted + extract wealth from them, then in their world that's a no-brainer.
That's just not true at all. The fruit I buy is designed to make my life worse? The vacuum cleaner? The lawn mower? The workout equipment? The standing desk for my office? The clothing I buy?
* fruit - I can get any fruit anytime in the year, and it seems fine
* vacuum cleaner - my Miele is still running ten years later and still available new
* The lawn mower - the M18 mower cuts great and uses no gas and just works - much better than the previous PoS
* workout equipment - I don't have much here, but my rowing machine is still going strong
* standing desk - the uplift desk seems quite good quality
* clothing - this might be the only one, but even the walmart crap I get is better than the walmart crap from a decade ago
Go to the actual farm in strawberries season next time, get yourself some, and you'll get that. And it's like this with almost every single fruit.
"The proportion of devices which had to be replaced within five years due to a defect rose quite sharply, from 3.5% in 2004 to 8.3% in 2012."
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/press/pressinformation/obs...
Electronics are more likely to be obsolete for technical reasons, but - for example - modern dishwashers and dryers are far more likely to have cheap plastic parts that fail more quickly. Even for brands with premium price tags.
With clothes, fast fashion is designed down to a budget and up to a price. For consumer brands, the more expensive something is the more disposable it is and the shorter its working life.
https://irispublishers.com/jtsft/fulltext/analysis-of-qualit...
E.g.
- Is it addictive?
- Does it have the potential to destroy lives?
- Does it have the potential to destroy lives in seconds?
- Does it have a strong lobbying mechanism behind it? (n.b. things that are good and nice rarely need someone to bribe people to accept them)
or simply:
- Would you be worried if your child did it?
I think the number of "yes" that you get draws a very clear line.
Sounds like you're implying some sort of mischaracterization of sugar here which minimizes the former in a weird way.
The alcohol mentioned in a sibling comment also ticks the box.
For the sugar, I'd say yes, no, no, yes and "not too much, but I'm keeping an eye out".
Unsafe driving in ANY car? Yes - but that's already illegal.
I can literally book right now, for 4 long laps, for £99 any of the following (and that's a a very small subset of 30 similar cars): Lotus Evora / GTR 1200bhp / Lamborghini Gallardo / Dodge Viper SRT VX / Huracan... Unless you'd say these are not performance cars?
Military technology may be an exception as "necessary evil", but also is a bad example because it id not consumer-oriented.
A large number of these literally save people's lives. Anti-biotics, statins, anti-depressives, anti-psychotics, insulin, anti-histamines.
You don't just exclude / include entire class by giving a few examples.
But that's what we have, it's never black & white. Always a process and always evolving.
That said, there is a HUGE need for more regulation around advertising, cut off limits and companies recognising users with a problem.
If you take a Bar for example, most barmen will notice you're already drunk as hell and cut you off, probably kick you out if not get you some water etc. It's actually a legal requirement to stop at some point in countries.
Casinos on the other hand, if you are down 99,000 out of your 100,000 with zero hands of games won, that casino is going to plow you with a good time until it has that last 1,000. It's disgusting.
I hate gambling , I've seen its effect on friends of mine and their families. But I would never stop an adult doing what they want, while knowing the risks.
Asking a casino to behave better is never going to work, adding more regulations and stricter licensing might. The fact that betting companies are now allowed to advertise and sponsor sports is an incredible negative step.
Insurance is a tool for spreading risk, and modern society could not operate without it.
You may be right that guns are are corrosive to a democratic society, that's an open debate. But the people who depended on that factory had the rug pulled and real harm was done without any regard to their welfare. And not everyone who depended on the factory worked there, deli owners and dry cleaners, these types of legitimate businesses are damaged when a major employer closes doors.
I suppose I relate this story to you just to show that, there are other people who think like you, guns are stigmatized, and it has a real human cost. We should not be flippant with our neighbor's well being, because we can't predict the turns of fate, one day it might be our turn.
They shutdown because they sold 7.5 million guns that could fire without someone pulling the trigger and 60 minutes exposed it.
And you should know that their building is being converted into a 250,000 sqft AI data center. So it's not like employment is just lost in the area.
Haven't the locals suffered enough already?
Could you expand on this a little bit? Are you referring to the NY SAFE act? I'm seeing a few lines in their wiki page that suggest otherwise:
* In June 2007, a private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, acquired Remington Arms for $370 million, including $252 million in assumed debt.
* Remington filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March 2018, having accumulated over $950 million in debt
* In July 2020, Remington again filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Any reasoning that can justify even an absurdly evil employer's existence is flawed.
We should not keep bad things alive just because jobs depend on it.
of course you're implicitly making an argument, you really expect us to think that you just decided to post some random anecdote apropos of nothing?
What about pharma and for-profit healthcare employees?
If people choose to seek out entertainment that’s bad for them then there’s nothing wrong with providing a market for it. It’s on the consumer to know their own limits.
She finally gave it up, moved to Texas, and now manages influencer networks.
It's good that the law isn't the only line between good and evil. A bit of stigma is a bottom-up way for people to shape society.
If nobody invites you to dinner parties because you run a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading, that's a good thing. It's free alpha for companies doing more worthwhile things.
I think like you argue, society shaping business is good. And some people should really reevaluate what they're going for if that's too much for them.
I have no problems with the porn industry--if anything I think the requirements are too strict. Being able to inspect the records during business hours looks innocent enough, but it assumes you have an office and business hours. And it requires more dissemination of real identities than ideal. Virtually all the sins it's blamed for aren't accurate. About the only valid objection is that porn is no more realistic sex than Hollywood is realistic life. And because we won't do something sensible like actually teach kids about it there are problems from not having other models and not understanding how unrealistic it is.
Gambling, nuke from orbit. Large scale gambling operations have no redeeming social value.
Now I'm as as free-minded as people typically gets, but both of those are just "entertainment" for me, one is not more "essential" than the other, what exact "human need" does pornography meet that somehow gambling doesn't also meet, since we're not talking about "fun" or "entertainment" here but something else it sounds like.
Boiling Gambling down to just being "entertainment" is a bit too reductionist in my opinion.
For what purpose do you think that industry was indirectly created for, if not to make money from people? Even if it might not have been created with that intent (although I'd still argue it was), today it surely is mainly driven and maintain with the (at least) implicit purpose of extracting money from people, that's literally why we call it an "industry" instead of just a "community".
The original poster has not expressed this correctly, but I assume that the intention was to say that the gambling industry is different from all other industries, not because it extracts money like any other industry, but because it does not return a product or service for that money.
The porn industry is no different from any other entertainment industry and it provides a service for money.
Gambling does not really provide any service, it just exploits the hope of the gamblers that they might gain something by gambling, which at least on average, never happens.
I do not think that one can call the stimulation of this hope of gaining as entertainment. There are some gamblers for which gambling is really entertainment, i.e. they are rich and they do not seriously expect to gain anything, but the majority of the gamblers do not do this to be entertained but because of the irrational hope of gaining enough to solve all their problems.
The problem with gambling is that people often get addicted and ruin their lives due to it.
While that probably can happen with porn I think the likelihood is a couple of orders of magnitude lower.
I mean yes, it is; It’s not a charity. I guess you could argue it tends to do it slower than gambling?
- helps in managing sexual needs, which can be difficult to handle otherwise, and especially replace
- educational: whether it is about workings of sex, ideas to improve your sex life with a partner, or something to discover about yourself
I suppose there's more to it, but most other things I can think of are an extension to meeting sexual needs.
There are plenty of "sexual needs" that society says "no, you can't satisfy them." (for example, Nguyễn Xuân Đạt).
I don't think sexual needs are needs that can't be managed without media.
> educational: whether it is about workings of sex
I find when a partner characterizes porn, the sex is worse... Maybe other people enjoy the sounds or behaviors seen in the videos, but not for me.
Of course they can, but it still helps - that's why I used that wording.
Also replacement of one sex need with another feels more viable than with other needs, given how the chemical machinery of the body seems to work.
> I find when a partner characterizes porn, the sex is worse... Maybe other people enjoy the sounds or behaviors seen in the videos, but not for me.
I can't say that the content isn't majorly bad, or that the field is not rife with abuse. That's a real problem, but I think u related to the original question of "does it address a real need".
In this case I think the main takeaways are the ideas, techniques, and what you can learn about body from some of the more realistic videos. Somewhat unfortunately, many people pick wrongly, but I do believe right choices exist.
(for the record, these ideas I'm writing about are not my own, but my observations as a member of the society. I wish these topics were less taboo, but it is what it is.)
No buddy, not the same.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
Stigma and regulatory pressure don't always mean the company is evil.
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.)
I chuckled.
If you add something to the conversation and sneak the joke in, it'll usually pass by the fun police.
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.
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 unwanted "finding" too. Again, we cannot calculate. But it's worth bringing up proportionality. Because you could make the same argument about a mass retailer like Walmart. They sell tires that were used in drunk driving crashes, they sold food eaten by obese people, they sold cigarettes (at least thru the 90s) to lung cancer victims, etc. You can skew the data however you like because they sold items to so many customers. But they also fed a lot of families and reduced the cost of living (sometimes by nefarious means) for a lot of poor people.
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.
You think so?
Do you think payment providers should act like moral police that decide how the customers can spend their money? If so, do you think Google/Apple/Microsoft should have a say in which apps the users can install? Should ISPs decide which sites the users can access?
The author is saying it explicitly, you can’t flex as normal people do so you have to feed your ego finding different ways such as anonymous posts. Or talking to an stranger being drunk.
Add in crypto and some AI, and there’s a $50m funding round waiting for you.
> Employees join such projects for various reasons. Some realize that the pay is better than in legitimate projects. Others come because they couldn’t find a job where they wanted to, or because they are simply interested in working on something forbidden. And then a good company saving the world will come along and offer them a job, and they’ll leave. Building a stable team from people with this kind of motivation is hard.
I think OP made this whole article up. Everyone that applies for Aylo knows exactly what they're applying for. The pay is below-average because (a) there's not actually a lot of money in porn and (b) there's no shortage of dudes that want to work in it.
Had a recruiter reach out to me the other day from a sports gambling website (one of the major ones, as reputable as you can get in this industry). I heard them out, thinking they would offer above market rate but in actuality, they offered significantly below market rate.
There is a large talent pool who want to get their lives back on track.
I wouldn't care if my company was working in adult industry - I was working in a condom factory for a short while and the employees were some of the funniest, chillest people I worked with, with sex-related themes always somewhere in the context, but that was making everyone relaxed and genuinely nice. I'd expect porn tech company to be similar.
Thanks for reading! When writing this essay, I drew solely on my own experience. I’ve often noticed that startups post job listings with misleading job descriptions, especially in stigmatized industries. It’s only after the interview that they reveal what the work will actually entail. Perhaps you simply haven’t noticed such job listings.
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 by the networks themselves, in response to lobbying by groups such as Collective Shout. https://nabesaka.com/visa-mastercard-deciding-content-legali...
Whatever you think about NSFW media or gambling in particular, you _should_ worry that Visa and/or Mastercard could decide tomorrow that they don't want to process payments for you and cause you to lose your livelihood.
Similar issues exist for, e.g., companies and sites selling legal THC and THC products.
They can and have used this power to effectively censor legal content. I don't think this sort of power is something that a private entity should hold. Being able to refuse service is fine for a random restaurant when there's 10 other options available, much less so for a duopoly that provides a key facet of modern life.
It's important to keep these things (almost) in the open, because when they become illegal, criminals move in and people get hurt.
When I was an intern at a big-name, conservative company, one of my friends came from a porn website.
Don't blame the vice, blame the person.
One thing I've noticed about HN in recent years is if publications (right or left) start posting about something, the topic turns quickly into flamewar territory. What used to be subtle debate turns into slogans copy/pasted from these articles along with hyperbole. Hard to avoid I guess with how big HN has become.
Wow. That will certainly do better for sex trafficking and illegal porn. Criminalising all of it.
Compared to something else that sells a tangible good on the internet, or some ordinary software as a service thing... If you have 10,000 charges to 10,000 different people placed from an ordinary merchant, and you compare that to 10,000 charges from a porno website, there will be a vastly larger number of chargebacks and human-caused fraud disputes with the porno website. It's a continual and ongoing pain in the ass for any credit card processor that does business with such a merchant.
The major processors (stripe and its top competitors) have decided that it is not worth the hassle and are completely happy to cede this niche market to specialists. Basically for the same reason that a car loan through a subprime lending company originated by a "buy here pay here" car sales lot will have a much higher percentage interest rate, because of the risk to the lender, credit card processing for the adult entertainment market will have a much higher percentage fee charged to the merchant to run those cards.
No; source?
It's been a while since I've read article on something like online gambling without feeling like the author was trying to proselytize.
Edit:
I appreciate the human perspective shared by the article, and get the feeling that OP offers a warning of the consequences of working in stigmatized fields. Ofc online gambling (and gambling in general tbh) is a terrible thing that ruins lives.
That’s because you are operating in the market of degeneracy, taking profits by offloading your victims’ losses on their commercial counterparts through the bankruptcy system and the rest of us through social services.
There is a reason there were laws against this until the degeneracy operators figured out how to further corrupt our democracy.
If you don't appear to be a casino at first glance, it's a lot easier to find employees, payment processors and advertising networks willing to work with you.
Brick-and-mortar companies (notably Walmart) used the same trick to get tech talent. Having Walmart on your tech resume doesn't look great, having an e-commerce startup called jet.com looks much better, even if Walmart is that startup owner and sole customer.
I stopped to think what a cool product in this area may look like, without being toxic. Maybe a site explaining why betting loses money in the long term, or how casinos hook gamblers up with random-looking but not entirely random responses of the one-handed bandits?
Why do you think Onlyfans is the reigning platform for what it does.
Not because it's technically superior, or has the best advertising, or any other logical reason you might summon.
It's because they have a sweetheart deal with a payment processor (Stripe).
I put some time into seriously investigating what it'd take to get an adult-content platform off of the ground, here is one of the emails I received from a self-advertised "high-risk processor":
> "Yes, we do have some Payment Facilitator solutions. However, none of these processors will accept Adult content."
Gambling/betting though? Overwhelming societal damage with basically no upside beyond the ghouls in charge. Regulate this shit to death, tyvm.
and uncontrolled urban sprawl with no public transit.
It doesn't necessarily have to be harmful for it to be stigmatized by society.
What I would LOVE to see in the United States in particular is a system where we tax pornography and then plow that money back into sex education in public schools. The state of sex education in the United States is so far beyond a joke it is a travesty.
That said, I also feel a lot of folks who are pro-legislation are quite dishonest about the negative side-effects of legalization. They definitely exist!
I know I will get downvoted for this because it is an unpopular opinion, but this exactly the reason why we need bitcoin as a means of payments without any middlemen involved.
Public to the point of the transaction getting linked to your identity at some point, crazy inefficient in terms of energy use, very very slow and crazy expensive.
There are so many better ways to use crypto to pay for things and you decided to suggest bitcoin?
And you seem to be really really convinced that bitcoin is the way, by going the quite a length and bringing some contraptions to say they're bitcoin-based solutions somewhat providing what other coins/network already offer - better.
And concerning lightning, it only "preserves privacy" when you're extremely careful with how you use it: https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/technical/lightning...
Still the worst idea.
Plus, on-chain transactions would NOT be used to pay 10€/Month subscriptions. The lightning network (a bitcoin layer-2 network) handles transactions instantly and with lower fees. No miners involved in individual payments here (only for channel creation).
The thing about layer 2 solutions is, they evolve much faster than the base layer (bitcoin). So dont trust statements that are some years old.