I got shipped to California to date tech guys
nymag.com
nymag.com
Why wouldn't this "be allowed"? More importantly, what is the entity that would or would not be doing the "allowing"?
They either don't know about it or they don't care.
For further thought by someone "who doesn't see the problem" (me) read my other comment.
Feel free to reply to that and let me know what you think about what I have said. I think it's a practical solution to a problem.
I don't necessarily agree with firing people over politically incorrect jokes either, but in this case there is no party that is potentially suffering damages. I.e. in the case of misogynist jokes by an employee, the company may believe it's reputation would suffer unless mitigating action was taken.
There is no analog here ..
My slow path to conservatism.
Of course, this works better for social conventions like "call me by my last name" or "pay for your date's dinner" than for stuff like "don't be gay", which is sadly what's more associated with conservatism in this country.
If you mean conservatism of the political kind, come live in Texas for awhile to get a taste of life in a conservative state; you're likely to reconsider how far you want to go down that path. I'm a lifelong Republican and always thought of myself as fairly conservative; in recent years, though, mainly because of the Tea Party -- and the life lessons learned from the challenges of, e.g., raising two kids to adulthood -- I've probably voted for Democrats almost as often as for Republicans. I have Republican friends who are so disenchanted that they've talked about switching parties.
Society is really becoming very intolerant because people don't conform to their little bubbles.
My point is just because he's not single and not the target market, he shouldn't be asking for a ban on a dating scheme.
I'm single and find the whole idea of "flying in women to meet geeks" to be a bit strange, but this idea that it should be banned is ludicrous.
There's too much "I don't like this" or "I don't understand this" so let's have some entity ban it.
I have nothing to do with whatever these people are doing.
>>> But if this isn't insulting to women in tech
Who is "women in tech"? It's not a person that you can insult. Why "women in tech" should have single opinion about anything and be - all of them, collectively - insulted by something? And why, if some woman or multiple women are insulted by this, we shouldn't wait for them to tell us if they are insulted and listen what they are insulted by, instead of trying to guess it and wield that imaginary insult as a weapon?
Sometimes a dongle as an adapter. Sometimes it's a dick.
It's not hard to tell the difference.
> It's not hard to tell the difference.
Perhaps, if you know that "dongle" is a technical term, and you don't take the sentence out of context (like overhearing only one sentence). Besides, many catch themselves in making unintentional puns and innuendos, only noticing after-the-fact that the sentence could be interpreted in another way. It surely isn't so unlikely that one can justify firing people point-blank when they do make such a mistake!
That was Joe Schmoe male developer, who it is acceptable to fire for the slightest of reasons, including making an innocuous joke that wouldn't be out of place in a K-12 classroom. The men who are the customers of this startup are the rich guys in Silicon Valley who are awash in cash and cannot be fired.
The two are worlds apart, don't be under any impression that they mix in any sense whatsoever. Unfortunately, the first group (Joe Schmoe) is squeezed to the max by policing by interest groups like "Geek Feminism" and suchlike. Notably, Geek Feminism seems to have a neutral/positive approach to this Dating Ring thing (http://geekfeminism.org/2013/12/30/happy-new-linkspam-30-dec...) -- the company is referred to as "Y Combinator's first all-female company", and no negative comments.
I'm guessing you missed the news over the last couple months of GitHub[1] and Rap Genius[2] each letting a co-founder go?
[1] https://github.com/blog/1826-follow-up-to-the-investigation-...
[2] http://recode.net/2014/05/26/rap-genius-co-founder-moghadam-...
Meanwhile, Joe Dev who is working 10 hours a day will be fired for saying "Hee hee hee, look at this huge dongle I just got." at a tech conference.
As for your "evidence" from GeekFeminism, you will note that that's a linkspam page, merely linking and quoting, without any commentary. And the quote is not about The Dating Ring, but about the changes that are necessary for the industry to become more diversified. (Yes, there's a lot of irony in this coming from the women who're responsible for this bride-for-sale scheme)
Sounds a lot more like an interest police out to get guys than anything to do with respect for women to me.
This has been rehashed aplenty. Sexual innuendo between two people, when not directed at a third person does not qualify as disrespect to the third person, unless you're trying very hard to feel disrespected.
> It certainly doesn't belong in a K-12 classroom.
If you think it doesn't belong in a K-12 classroom, I seriously doubt you have ever interacted with anyone in high school. Please read the data in this and draw your own conclusions. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-ATSRH.html
The answer should be fairly obvious.
As for point 2, the fact that teens are currently taught to be sexist doesn't mean they should be taught to be sexist, or that it's OK. Especially not from adults.
As long as the participants knew what they were getting into, I think it was fine - everyone got what they signed up for, no promises of results were given. (as far as I understand from the article)
February 3 [1849]: The Raleigh Register runs an advertisement for women to go to the Gold Rush and get a rich husband, titled "A Chance FOR A LADY." Other efforts to encourage women to go to California include Mrs. Eliza Farnham of New York's attempt to organize a ship of intelligent women over the age of 25 to sail to San Francisco to meet miners. Editors in the east praised her efforts, but the plan failed.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldrush/timeline/
There was one that succeeded that I read about but I don't remember the details and don't have the time to look it up. It was either in The Barbary Coast or Rebecca Solnit's book about Muybridge.
It's hard to have a happy town when a third of your population will wind up alone.
This story doesn't qualify as sex trafficking by the definition, but actual sex trafficking is occurring.
"On a weirdness scale of 1 to 10, I think it sounds like this idea is hitting a solid 6 or so. Possibly some extra points for the glorified prostitution model of "Pay a ton to fly NYC girls, selected for their desire to spend 5 days out of town meeting rich men, to SF to meet super-rich tech founders"
I just want to point out that where we can look at this situation and say "That's kind of sleezy" we can look at a circumstances that are very similar but involve a different class (and education level) of people and see some extremely problematic behavior.
So yes, it's not sex trafficking, but I feel like it in some ways makes light of truly exploitive sex trafficking that's going on in a first world country.
That said, I could argue that it may very well be "sex trafficking" in the sense that a company is moving people from point A to point B for the purposes of sex and their own profit. It may not be exploitive, but it would take very, very little to make it that way.
Like I said, I don't want to be that guy, but as I get older I find myself appreciating more and more people's sensitivity to topics that are close to them.
By that definition, significant number of flights to Vegas is "sex trafficking".
I just want to be clear that I don't view prostitution as wrong per se. I don't know why it's OK to put out for a dinner or movie but apparently wrong for $100. What consenting adults do is their business.
That said, the line between "consensual" and "coerced" is very fine in the sex trade. The women in this article are engaged in a consensual business. They can walk away at any time. They presumably weren't tricked or lied to. But many in this thread find it uncomfortable and I presume we find it uncomfortable because you don't have to make very many changes to this scenario to make it go from "fun partying" to "pimping" to "sex trafficking". Hell, they've flown them cross country, all someone would have to say is "if you don't want to have sex, leave, but you get your own plane ticket" for it to go from a 6 to 9 on the scale the OP of this thread referred to.
Anyway, it's all beside the point. From the article it didn't seem like anything untoward happened. But make no mistake, something very similar is happening in Western North Dakota (women being flown in to "serve" a large population of single men) and it's sex trafficking all the way.
>>> all someone would have to say is "if you don't want to have sex, leave, but you get your own plane ticket"
If the implication was that the ticket is paid, that would be deception, unless explicitly agreed upfront that the sex is part of the deal (which it wasn't). However, nothing like that happened and nowhere in the article we can see that they were pressured to do anything they didn't want to do.
It says absolutely nothing about New York or San Francisco or any appreciable fraction of their residents.
I feel like all of these ridiculous startups are forgetting: just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
But you will be paying nearly $2k/mo to rent a bedroom; that much is true :-p
This is just a small part of it.
"I meet an angel investor who admits he gave to the Crowdtilt to butter up CEO Lauren Kay so she’d accept his money. “With these Y Combinator companies, sometimes so many people want to invest that they end up turning down money,” he explained. He’d given money to the Dating Ring to secure the chance to give even more money to the Dating Ring. He wouldn’t tell me how much he invested, but did mention a desire to buy an airplane."
And how about this:
"Today’s daytime activity is a picnic in the park. I find Lisa and tell her it’s time to do as the San Franciscans have done since before the dawn of personal computing: get high. She goes to Dolores Park to seek weed from strangers, while I return to the hotel and initiate a texting phone tree. Twenty minutes later, as a white guy with dreadlocks is dumping vegan brownies onto the bed, there is a knock on the door and the Nightline film crew is standing there with a camera and a giant light. “Just a minute!” I shout through a crack in the door. When the dealer exits, I wonder if Nightline thinks I boned him."
Reading this article made me very uncomfortable.
When I was dating myself years ago I had a trivially easy time getting really good looking women (that I would never meet locally) by driving a bit to NYC. I remember thinking "I need to move here even if this relationship (the women that I met doing this) breaks up".
The name for this is a "target rich environment". It's as much about supply and demand as it is about other issues.
Though it is really an open question whether the underutilized resource like male techies of SV can be efficiently made into business inventory desirable by the potential customers. The article doesn't sound optimistic here.
To me it felt more like the underutilized resource was the hot women in NYC. But that would be too degrading to the women. So they couldn't possibly take that angle.
"...which is a blessing, since gossiping about dates is more fun than actually going on them."
"We’re doing shots! This will be great B-roll!" I scream...
Arranged matches are fine and have been working out fairly well for hundreds of years. But when one of the parties is more interested in making some sort of production out of the experience than in finding an actual relationship, the program is going to fall flat. They would do much better getting female participants on a volunteer basis, preferably not from a large metropolis, who are more interested in finding a relationship than in making a "B-roll".
^^ THIS. There must be some pretty lonely guys out there. I can only hope the more genuine ones learned their lesson after it ended.
Best example: The poor fellow who left early to work for Yahoo at 8:00 am. He may have only understood the ethics that he had bought into after it ended.
Women who try and make anything off this crap are selfish to the point of degrading those around them. They're really horrible people to be around, let alone to sleep with -- because they're too self-absorbed with the money and free ride to factor in the precedent they're setting for the kind of interaction that's socially acceptable around potential mates.
DO WE REALLY want a society where people who work hard, are forced to compete financially to have an attractive mate fly in, do B-rolls, get high, and to demonstrate what a cold and mechanical interaction they actually want?
Women: How would you like it if this was the kind of world you had to live in to find affection from a man? Pay $1,000 to have him come in and show you that your money, work, and desire for affection is just as worthless as anyone else's.
Because THAT is what your actions convey.
I think I'm with my grandparents on this one: These women need to learn to treat others exactly how they expect to be treated. Otherwise nobody can be their friend, foe, or lover.
Because when we start pretending that relationships and affection can be bought -- we won't be buying real affection.
Sam, what is this.
More power to the women who wanted to give it a shot.
Still, makes you think, why didn't it work out?
My simple explanation is that the organizers went for the dumb Big Bang Theory thing: brainacs paired with dashing beauties. I would hypothesize that if you were to select random 20 young women from NYC and paired them up with random men from SF (random within reason, of course) you would have had much less problems.
1. it has bugged almost everybody else for uncountable millennia before people :) So if it were a problem, the evolution would have already solved it. Which brings us to the next point :
2. it isn't a problem really, it is the solution that evolution came up with to make sure that blobs of organic matter move their a&&es, tails, tentacles, ...
If you want to simply stay on the dating side of things you could make a site designed for remote dates through web cam chats, cooperative games (anything from web based mini-games to co-op on Call of Duty depending on the interests of the players), IMing and texting. You don't need to be in the same physical place to get to know someone, thinking you do seems very backwards for a startup.
What's the plan here if two people do click? The service isn't going to pay for them to fly over for every date. It's the same situation as meeting someone online except that the initial date is face to face.
Just because a woman works in an industry doesn't mean she has any interest in dating there.
>>> You don't need to be in the same physical place to get to know someone, thinking you do seems very backwards for a startup.
Depends on your definition of "know", I guess. Ultimately, there are things between men and women that don't work well over chats ;)
I'm not judging morally, even if stating that it's a good way "to evaluate men" makes me uncomfortable.
Still, is it legal to write down this in the US?
EDIT: rephrase
But it could be used as evidence against you if the prosecutor were to get charges filed against you that you used weed.
Surely the prosecutors will be filing these charges any minute now, since the USA is now officially a police state.
EDIT: I don't know what people have against an honest (though perhaps naive?) question.
I have several hypotheses for Manhattan, but my best guess is that a major contributing factor is that the average age of marriage (and proportion of never-marrieds) is higher in Manhattan than outside. http://nypost.com/2010/01/05/all-the-single-people-in-manhat...
If the issue is with the men that they met, then I guess women in technology shouldn't date them if those kinds of men put them off? Romance and work is separate, at least if you want it to be.