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"Legalized prostitution is good"? For every independent escort charging rich businessmen $5000 for a dinner and a gentle romp there's multiple women turning tricks for their pimps in exchange for a small cut of the profits and a daily dose.
"Unions are evil"? For every successful independent contractor making big bucks there's multiple average guys who are only average at their jobs and need the union to maintain a living wage on a 9-5 job instead of being forced to participate in an Amazonian warehouse rat race.
You seem to be reasoning on what legal prostitution is from a (probably inaccurate) view of how illegal prostitution works.
Only 6% of private sector workers are unionized, so the hellish vision of everyone forced to participate in an Amazonian warehouse rat race is how it already works in the richest society known to man.
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I like meta behind the "unions are evil" example: It is the only example luxury belief that is right coded, and it's also the only belief that has a number of posters explaining why it's not actually a luxury belief but a "true fact about the world".
If the idea of luxury beliefs really has explanatory value as a model of the world, I would expect all political ideologies to have them in some capacity. So I would like to see more examples of these right-coded luxury beliefs.
I think this question came up before, and I suggested hard-line anti-abortion. It's easy for a wealthy conservative man to proclaim that no one should ever have an abortion, as by virtue of his wealth, he and his family are insulated from most of the "use cases" in which an abortion might be preferable to carrying a baby to term. Whereas a working-class woman who gets pregnant unexpectedly might find that carrying the baby to term is financially ruinous.
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Unions came into being in a world where there were the typical industrial workplace had work rules that could, by virtue of the nature of the work, only be negotiated explicitly and collectively, and which were very visibly matters of life and death. That world is a better world if institutions exist such that work rules can be negotiated collectively. (Historically, there were a lot of small strikes over safety issues, but few large ones).
In the world of 2025, more people have jobs where individual negotiation (including the implicit kind) just works better than collective negotiation, because every worker and every task is different. Also most of the life-or-death workplace practices (and a good many that are not) are governed either by explicit regulation or by implicit regulation by lawsuit and insurance company. That is a world where there is no pro-social work for unions to do.
It is an interesting question whether the negative side effects of unions or health-and-safety regulation are worse (I favour putting it to the test by allowing union-negotiated, but not individually-negotiated, contracts of employment to contract out of employment law and most of workplace safety law). But the world where neither existed was not in a stable equilibrium.
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This sounds like a strawman. What about the middle of the curve—the prostitutes who are neither desperate streetwalkers nor luxurious escorts, but merely work for reasonable wages in clean, legal brothels?
Oh gosh, years back I read something about a woman returning to prostitution because it was a good way for her to make a living, and she discussed working in one of the legal brothels in
UtahNevada (I think). She was one of the prostitutes who didn't mind taking black clients, so she was always able to get customers. I think she preferred to go independent if she could, because the brothel takes a cut of everything by charging for laundry, condoms, etc. on top of the cut they take from the transaction, so they nibble away at the fee the prostitute gets from the client. Which is why a lot of prostitutes try to arrange "and if you want, I'll do X for Y charge cheaper" with a client without the house knowing, so they can make more money.But the situation in Nevada, where prostitution is restricted to sparsely-populated areas and is largely drowned out by the illegal trade in Las Vegas, presumably is a far cry from the situation in the metropolises of Melbourne and Brisbane.
According to forum discussions that I've seen, many Australian prostitutes refuse to serve Indians.
Possibly. This was years back and I'm nowhere near familiar enough with how legal prostitution works. But the impression I carried away was that brothels will nickel and dime the prostitutes, because it's a business and it's all about making the maximum profit for the owners (same with strip clubs where the dancers are encouraged to get the marks to buy overpriced watered-down alcohol and to spend on buying lap dances etc. because if you're not turning over as much money for the owners as possible, you're out and a new dancer gets her chance).
I have never understood why some women go on about how sex work is empowering for women. The real money and profit and power accrue to the owners and operators of such businesses, who generally are men not women. Sure, the strippers and prostitutes get to manipulate the johns for money, but the pimps/madams/owners get to manipulate the prostitutes.
Presumably, as a luxury belief.
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Perhaps the most obvious conclusion is that they're genuinely asexual (or just uncritically repeating asexual talking points), so sex work to them is legitimately not meaningfully distinguishable from any other work.
This doesn't prevent them from responding to other incentives, of course- for instance, a prostitute might prefer prefer porn be banned if they believe it would lead to greater demand for their services. Whether or not they're aware they're prostitutes is another matter.
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How can we determine what the modal prostitute is like?
I don't have any statistics in front of me.
Wikipedia cites studies showing that 90 percent of the prostitution in Nevada (including Las Vegas), USA, is illegal, and presumably most of that is streetwalkers. But on the other end we have Victoria (including Melbourne), Australia, where there are zillions of legal brothels that even are allowed to advertise their services online. Is it reasonable to say that the typical prostitute in those locations is a streetwalker? I don't know, but I feel doubtful.
Most US prostitution is not streetwalker (estimates range from 10-20% streetwalkers). The dominant forms of prostitution are call-girls/escorts and pseudo-brothels (e.g. massage parlors, etc.). Both claim the fig leaf (with varying seriousness/success) that the payment is nominally for other legal services and any sex is just happenstance.
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The first example is spot on, and it's pretty much the same as the OnlyFans one (very attractive women stand to gain, others less so).
My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether the modal worker stands to benefit by joining one or not.
But how much of that is intrinsic to unions, and how much is a result of a specific implementation of unions, under which they are immune to antitrust laws while companies are not (1 2)?
The Motte doesn’t like unions because most of the Motte works in Sillicon Valley where until recently individual employees had an unusually large amount of leverage. In five years when they’ve all been fired they will probably feel differently about the idea.
I've seen proposals for tech worker unions. It's mostly about social justice and workers refusing work due to ethical concerns. As though a union could block a corporate contract with the Israeli government or the US military. As though less work is good for us.
Another main issue is making it harder to fire tech workers. It being easy to fire tech workers is a good thing. Driving out weaklings is obviously good. It makes the rest of us more valuable.
The one defensible point they make is regarding number of hours worked. I understand why some people don't want long hours. I'm still against the proposals since hiring more people to do the same amount of work would probably result in a decrease in compensation per person.
The above points are pushing for more people and person-hours with less work. That should result in a decrease in total compensation per worker. My entire concern is total compensation. Their concern is progressive culture warring and an understanding of workers' rights that amounts to encouraging mediocrity. Our values are incompatible and I don't want a union forced onto me. They would be taking my dues and spending them on progressive political lobbying while working on goals that would decrease my total compensation. In every way bad for me and opposed to my values. And then people act like "techbros" are fools working against their own interests.
They want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and tell me it is for my own good.
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Citation needed.
Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.
Most of the polyamory/aella gangbang posts are from christians/social conservatives saying polyamory and the sexual revolution have failed, fun is bad and you'll pay.
Normal Christians outside of Silicon Valley wouldn’t even know who Aella is, or that polyamory is a thing.
You keep making these assertions, and I am willing to tentatively grant that Aella specifically maybe isn’t on the radar of “Normal Christians,” but hearing about polyamory is unavoidable, even out here in deep flyover country.
Do “Normal Christians” have more than a surface-level awareness of the concept and a desire to grant debating the concept any more time than “That’s just fornication with extra steps?” Probably not, but I would anecdotally state that they do know it is a thing.
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I'm in tech, but I've never even been to the Bay Area. I'm just part of the rat adjacent diaspora, living in a landlocked state.
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I, @FarNearEverywhere and @Tollund_Man4 are Irish
and live in Ireland, the former two residing there and the latter in France. @self_made_human and @mrvanillasky are both Indian, with the former residing in the UK.As for the claim that the only people who care about those topics are people who live in Silicon Valley: have you not noticed that the entire world has been talking about AI nonstop for the past two years? Have you not noticed what a hot-button issue the trans stuff is in every Western nation, to the point that Trump signed an executive order banning men from competing in women's sports, and the UK Supreme Court recently had to rule on the definition of the word "woman"? Indian caste dynamics are of profound import to the 1.5 billion people who live in India (even if only 1% of those people express an opinion about caste dynamics, that's still five times the population of Silicon Valley), never mind the diaspora. There's been a nationwide campaign of arson against Tesla because of the outsized power Musk wields (wielded?) as part of DOGE.
Of the items on your list, polyamory and Aella sound like the only ones to me which are uniquely Silicon Valley-coded.
I left for France two years ago. But to add to your point I don't work in tech and have never even been to the United States.
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I'm pretty sure some of the Indian caste dynamics people are in actual India.
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Best I can do you is to say that I don’t live in Silicon Valley.
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The fact that similar patterns are visible in other countries with a strong union tradition (e.g. France, UK) but without legal analogues to the American antitrust legislation you cite.
I suspect most countries now have some form of anti-trust legislation. Wikipedia has some details on the price fixing page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing However, there may have been periods of time where countries had strong unions but no anti-cartel legislation. I think Australia only cracked down on price fixing after 1974.
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