BahRamYou
6mo ago
I don't really understand your point. Isn't it genuinely considered wrong for a boss to order their employee to do something that's wildly out of their job description? Or likewise to suddenly cut their pay for no reason? Usually there are rules against that sort of thing. Of course she has some agency, she can say no, but her life is going to get messed up when she gets fired, so she'd be justified in filing a lawsuit in that situation. Or at least cursing out her boss to anyone who'd listen. Making it about sex just makes it worse because it makes her think about gross things, so it's emotionally disturbing even if she can say no.
Are you an anarcho-capitalist who thinks that absolutely everything should be legal as long as there's no physical force used? I know there are some people who think that way, but that's a really fringe view that now many people share.
BahRamYou
6mo ago
I feel like a lot of this could be avoided if we had paid public toilets, like they do in Europe. But those are illegal in America, so we rely on private businesses to offer bathrooms as a weird public service, and that trust can easily be broken.
BahRamYou
6mo ago
Well, the short easy answer is that it's clearly illegal, and almost everyone would think that it's morally wrong. So this feels like you're asking a weird academic question like "can you logically justify from first principles why murder is wrong?" I'm not an ethical philosopher, I'm just some guy, going off of what feels right and wrong.
But sure, I'll play along. To start. this:
you are intuiting, as many do, that sex is sacred and people who trade it it engage in sacrilege.
Absolutely not me lol. I'm a lifelong atheist, and a huge degenerate who has often paid for sex. I also have some friends who were former sex workers.
I think I can confidently speak on this topic because I have so much experience with it. When you're paying for sex, it's not just a simple business transaction. It's still an intimate act that triggers strong emotions. Scientifically, it causes a huge spike of oxytocin, which is a hormone linked to pair-bonding, especially in women. So it's actually really hard to just wham-bam-thank you maam with no emotions. The girls I met who could do that seemed incredibly damaged. Most still liked to talk a little and have some sort of emotional intimicy (and I liked that too).
They also usually have a pimp/manager who can handle the business side of things. Partly that's for pragmatic reason (they can bring in customers and chase down the deadbeats who don't pay up). But I think it's also an emotional need, to separate the business side away from the sexual side. Most working girls have strict rules that they do not have sex with their own manager, and the less-shady managers should also follow that rule. If they do, they usually end up horribly abused. In that sense, even asking for sex is wrong, because it turns what used to be a strictly business relationship into this weird mixed thing, and the woman will have to constantly think about that every time she's with her boss now. Sex work is work, but it's emotional work in a weird way that's very different from normal jobs, and part of that emotional work is just dealing with men constantly propositioning you for weird sex acts.
The market will price in the value of it
In my experience there's not much of a "market price," you have to haggle for everything like an old-school bazaar. So that's another area where it gets weird, and the girl can get taken advantage of if she doesn't know how much to ask for. (or the customer can get ripped off also). I guarantee this 20-yr-old Au Pair did not know how much to charge a famous rich guy for kinky BDSM sex.
as you do, that taken to their logical conclusion make any sort of arrangement involving sex (including marriage) into rape.
Also that is totally not my position. I was trying to explain why I think what he did was morally wrong, even though it wasn't rape. There should be a middle ground of scumminess, where there's deception and coersion but not actually rape.
@FiveHourMarathon this is also my answer to you
BahRamYou
6mo ago
There are many forms of power besides just physical force, which is the entire reason we have laws against underage sex or sex with drunk people. Please don't tell me you think it's fine and dandy for a boss to tell his female employee that she must have sex with him to get a job because "she has agency and can say no."
BahRamYou
6mo ago
Good answer! Thanks. I'm not religious, but I do think in a similar way- we're all vulnerable to temptation, and we have to constantly use willpower to guard against it. Different people respond to different types of temptation, so I think women more often go down the path of emotional manipulation and narcissm rather than physical sexual debauchery.
I feel like the real story is that this isn't just one guy. It's part of an ongoing pattern where a lot of men turn into creepy sexpests when they're given fame and power. And this guy was able to cover it up for decades, so it makes you wonder if basically every celebrity is secretly like this and they're just hiding it. And to some extent it makes me wonder- are these celebrities uniquely terrible, or is every man a creepy sexpest at heart, and we just restrain ourselves because we don't have the power to get what we want?
BahRamYou
6mo ago
I had that thought too. I think a lot of us just don't have to think about these things very much, because we don't live a life where young attractive women are constantly throwing themselves at us. For most guys "sexual ethics" are pretty simple- you go to your wife/girlfriend/LTR and see if she's in the mood. I don't know what I would do if I was living the celebrity life. I imagine that must be one hell of an intoxicating experience, and this guy has been living it for decades.
BahRamYou
6mo ago
Stuff like this makes me think that "consent", as a binary yes/no, is not a good model of human relations. Like, we all agree that having sex with who's falling-down drunk is wrong, even if she enthusiastically says yes. And there's no clear line for "how much alcohol is too much." For age, there's a clear legal line, but most people still think it's creepy for a too-old man to have sex with a too-young woman. But everyone has different opinions on how much age gap is too much. A supervisor at work dating their employee is also not inherently illegal, but there's a lot of guidelines about it and situations where it can be considered into sexual harassment.
In this case, there's all sorts of things that create a power imbalance. The guy was rich, famous, and apparently charming. He had legions of fans reading his stuff when they were teenagers, so he was effectively "grooming" them without even having met them. He liked to play dom during sex, and had a lot of experience in it, while he was meeting young women with very little experience. It seems like he met a lot of women who were enthusiastically into it, to the point where he might be genuinely confused that someone wasn't consenting with him.
I wish there was a middle ground. Something in between "he's guilty of rape, send him to prison for 20 years" and "he did nothing wrong, so let him off scott-free." A fine seems meaningless when he's so rich. Maybe a good dose of social shaming is the right punishment. Even rich people still care a lot about their social reputation, and this can be a good lesson to everyone about some of the darker sides of human sexuality. Maybe sex-ed classes could include a lesson on the dangers of falling in love with a celebrity.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Bro, you must realize that what you're proposing has been proposed many times before, in various forms. Mostly famously by Bush in 2000s. I think there was a decent argument for it back then, but also lots of arguments against it which I paraphrased. I didn't doing anything malicious to you, it's just I've heard this debate way too many times. It's definitely not a good idea to pump government money into equities (either as a soverieng wealth fund or any other similar form) when equity Price-Earnings ratios are near all-time highs.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
We did though... we had this debate for the entire 20 years. It went and on, it was miserable and depressing and no one seemed to offer any good solution until finally Biden pulled the plug on the whole ordeal.
No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally. We just wanted to capture/kill Bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders, and stop Afghanistan from being used as a terrorist training center. That was accomplished.
Unfortunately, in doing so we also removed their government and created a power vacuum in one of the most violent and unstable countries in the world. Everyone kind of felt bad about that, as well as worried that this would lead to more recruitment of terrorists in the future, so there was a great deal of effort expended to try and keep the country peaceful and stable.
Turns out it's very difficult to change a culture! The people there are really, really religious, so a religious government like the Taliban had a lot of popular support. They're also very poor, so often there were no good options for local allies. If you shut down their money from Pakistan and bin Laden, that pretty much leaves Opium as their only source of money, which was controlled by the Taliban.
On the plus side, after retaking power the Taliban has started to act a little bit more like a real government and less like a terrorist organization. They're doing formal diplomacy with other countries, fighting the Islamic State, and seem to be cracking down on Opium production.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
The thing is, I was already a good student before I had that shitty job. It didn't motivate me to go and work harder, it actually just distracted me a lot from my studies. Saying I hopped-in-and-out is like saying someone can quickly move from from a brief drug addiction or short prison sentence. It's possible, there are people who do it, but it's not good for anyone, and there's an awful lot of people who get stuck there for lifetime. Most of the people I saw there were stuck there or in a similarly shitty job for their entire life.
I agree with you that it's unrealistic to not have shitty jobs. You seem to think that they can be done by native-born people who are just working there briefly on their path to a better life. I think that's unrealistic too, and that we should help citizens find a better life while letting immigrants from 3rd-world countries work the shitty jobs because it's still better than what they would have faced back home.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
I could have phrased it better, but my position is basically the mainstream economist view that a soveriegn wealth fund like you describe wouldn't make sense for the US:
To understand SWFs—and why America does not need one—consider two issues: the source of their wealth and how they use it. Traditionally, funds have been the preserve of countries flush with either commodities (Norway and the United Arab Emirates) or foreign-exchange holdings (China and Singapore). You might assume that the creation of a wealth fund is proof that these countries are rich. To some extent, that is true. But the funds also reflect scarcity: resources are finite, and good financial management is needed to ensure future generations benefit from the current bounty. (In the case of countries with bulging foreign-exchange holdings, their resources are proceeds from intervening in markets to restrain their currencies from appreciating.) America has no such windfall to manage.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Thanks. So by way of comparison, (statistica)[https://www.statista.com/statistics/193261/unadjusted-monthly-number-of-unemployed-men-in-the-us/] tells me there's a total of about 3.5 million unemployed men in the US right now. So we even if we took literally every single unemployed man and sent him to work in construction, it wouldn't massively increase the number of construction workers.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
At least by numbers, it's absolutely possible.
There's 37 universities in the top tier in China, which used to be known as project 985. It's super competitive to get into them, you need an extremely high score on the Gaokao national exam, which is like a series of AP/IB tests on crack. Top student basically devote their teen years to cramming for it. I don't know the precise score breakdown, but this comment: https://www.quora.com/In-China-what-percentage-of-students-get-admitted-to-tier-1-universities-and-how-hard-is-it says you need to be roughly in the top 1% of the general population to make it in there. This comment https://qr.ae/pYvrbd is in agreement, saying that 0.79% make it in there, which is 150,000 students per year.
By way of comparison, most ivy league schools are a little under 2000 students in each class. I'm not sure what you want to define as a top school, but let's say there's 20 of them each with 2000 students average. That's only 40,000 students in total. So you could easily fill every single spot at top American schools with Chinese kids, and it wouldn't even shrink the Chinese universities very much.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
I think if we actually started doing that en masse, we'd end up with a lot of youths much more loyal to China than to the US, and in some cases outright agents of the CCP.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
I don't really understand how your comment relates to the topic at hand. H1B visa holders are usually getting paid more than minimum wage, and migrant/illegal workers aren't bound by any rules at all.
My own experience is that the real world is a bit different from the perfect frictionless sphere econ101 view of the world. Working at a small shop, it's not always easy to replace someone, so they'll often put up with some shockingly bad behavior to avoid firing. But there's also shitty managers who enjoy flexing their petty power to make workers lifes worse just because they can, for not rational economic reason.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
My own personal preference is a complete meritocracy. If that results in a 55% Asian, 40% white, 5% other split, so be it. Nothing else seems fair to me.
Whats merit though? Standardized test scores? if you go that route, you might get a class completely filled with international Chinese students.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
is your username legit? You really want to be like the USSR and feed all people into the industrial machine, letting the weak die off from starvation?
BahRamYou
7mo ago
I think you misunderstand what it was like. the restaurant had a dashwasher. Not like the one you have at home, it was a huge industrial machine. It required two humans to constantly load and unload it, like an assembly line. If you want to raise pay for that sort of thing, you'd have to massively raise prices at the restaurant and no one would want to eat there anymore.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
If you're going out there regularly, building houses as fast as possible for competitive market prices, then yes you're in the trades.
If you're just doing it as a hobby for yourself then no, because that doesn't affect the overall market. It would be the same if some carpenter or plumber wanted to dabble in SD in his free time.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Hop between these temporary jobs for their entire working life and
- Have zero substance abuse issues and
- Have zero contact with the criminal justice system and
- Make it to retirement age with no savings
But why do you not care about those people? Those are also human beings and our fellow citizens. We should help them, not make fun of them for being losers and go "oh well, sucks to suck, I guess we're going to remake society to make their lives even worse."
BahRamYou
7mo ago
As I said in last weeks discussion of this topic, i have yet to be convince that the exchange of labor is somehow exempt from the ordinary rules of supply and demand.
The main problem is scale.
You want more eggs? no problem, raise wages and get more chicken workers.
You want more strawberries? No problem, raise wages and get more strawberry workers.
You want more of everything, across the board, espeicially in low-wage manual labor jobs that are hard to automate? Well... now you've run out of workers. You can raise wages as much as you want, but you're not going to magically get more workers out of thin air. It might have been different in 2010 when US unemployment was high. Now it's near record-lows, there's just not a lot of slack left in the economy. Or do you want to put my 90-yr old grandma at work building houses?
BahRamYou
7mo ago
thanks for this post, it's fascinating to get this kind of specifics from someone who really looked into the business.
There really seems to be this giant, gaping void in society now where we are lacking women in traditional roles, and the market just can't keep up.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
The MAGA base isn't exactly the most enlightened on racial issues
Is that true though? They might not be the most educated, but I feel like they have more direct, lived experience dealing with people of other races than most liberals do. Working class folks deal with Mexican migrant workers, Middle class folks deal with Indian H1B office workers, and southerners deal with black people in their community. The typical liberal either lives in a snow-white suburb, or in a city where the cost of living is so high that it effectively outlaws anyone who isn't very exceptional. They can live a fantasy of "all humans are the same, race is only skin deep" because they never have to actually interact with racial issues in their normal lives. For a working class person, race is very real and very important.
I don't think it's an "irrational bias" to say that hurting someone emotionally is wrong. What about hurting someone physically? Can you logically prove that it's wrong to hurt someone physically, or is that also just an irrational bias?
I think it's fine to turn emotions into a moneyed exchange. Normal people do it all the time with therapists, and maybe with all service jobs like bartenders, salesmen, etc. But those people know what they're getting in for, it doesn't get sprung on them by surprise from someone with power over them. It would also be wrong to trauma dump all of your psychological problems on some poor retail cashier.
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