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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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An article is making the rounds on rat-adjacent twitter entitled "The Nerdy Escorts Cashing In On Silicon Valley’s AI Boom."

I can't bypass the paywall, but someone posted on X:

Five years ago, it was rare for escorts to charge more than $1K per hour. Now, a handful of women charge much, much more: $3k, $5k an hour. $23k a day. $30k a weekend. Inside the shifting economics of intimacy in Silicon Valley...

I know that aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money. It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.

I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.

Even regardless of the moral aspect of the situation, the fact that a prostitute can make so much money is a huge slap in the face to people working hard for a living. That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.

Also, Tyler Cowen had a bit of a viral moment yesterday saying he wouldn't be surprised if 15 to 20% of all jobs in the near future are elder care. This of course sandwiched in a talk where he insists AI is great and making jobs not losing them!

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

Either way, the optimism from the pundit class around AI and the economy is feeling more and more hollow to me by the day. If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society? How will things go otherwise without some sort of relatively radical disruption? I try not to be a 'doomer' about AI, but I'm increasingly finding it hard to be optimistic on the impact of it on society.

There is way too much money floating around in these communities. It breeds certain pathologies, obscenely paid escorts being one of them. See also how there's the whole "unless you follow exactly our ideologies and beliefs and do what we say is the right way to do things then you'll be damned forever part of the eternal underclass".

The solution here is for these communities to be put in their place, which is only really going to happen via some form of external shock. When and if that happens nobody can say.

I agree completed. Income is way too laissez-faire today. The issue is that people who would spend their money on Aella are even allowed to get enough to spend 5 figures on her in the first place, not Aella herself. The injustice is that such people even have the money at all, not that they give it out to prostitutes. That money should be reserved for the highest types of people, which unfortunately is something Western capitalism cannot achieve. Because such people will hardly subject themselves to the free market as much as Aella fans.

Who decides what constitutes a "highest types of people"?

Let's not pretend like we don't know what virtue is.

We can barely agree on basic human morals, pretending that one cultural viewpoint of virtue is some how objectively correct already fails contact with reality.

Clearly put, if we decide that the "highest types" are ranked according to progressive virtues, then conservatives will hate it. We do christian virtues, then non-christians will riot. You've failed to articulate an actual measurement to decide who is an "Ubermensch" but you want a top down system to do so, meaning you need a metric and a decider. If the answer is "anyone I like" then congrats you have a thoroughly unoriginal idea that has existed for all of human history. It's also very bloody, and unstable and never creates an actual "better" society for anyone but those at the top.

How about we just weight all the measures by historical incidence rate? I think we all naturally conceive of what kind of measure that produces. The argument about virtue is boring and disingenuous and mostly just bad people coping.

Historical incidence rate of what? A particular value set? A behavioral distribution? A comparative cross-sectional study of different civilizational values throughout history and their effectiveness and pros/cons would be interesting but one would need to account for local selection pressures. Warlike values are very adaptive in violent, tribal, resource-scarce environments but not very useful in post scarcity western society where cooperation, norm-following, and restraint are likely more adaptive.

Virtue arguments are always boring because they are unfalsifiable and unrealistic. But i would disagree that it's just bad people coping. Needing to view people with a different value set from you as "bad" is already Untermensch behavior indicative of being a slave to basic primitive tribal impulses. Any real "highest type" would already be able to not be chained to those primordial impulses.

one would need to account for local selection pressures

No, that's what made good people/humanity. You do not need to „account“ for it.

Sounds like you reject warlike values. That is, manliness, courage, honour, bravery, leadership, assertiveness. See, you do know what I mean when I say virtue, you just want to reject virtue. But everybody knows that weakness, deceit, cowardice, long housedness, and going with the rabble are lowly characteristics. That's the problem, that people with those inferior traits get money at all. It's not because being warlike isn't adaptive for men, it's because man is beset by non-conscious entities which eat at his soul and rob him. Yes, capitalism likes the low, because capitalism is a demon and wants slaves in the form of degraded men. Worshiping that demon leads to race degeneration and we're seeing it. It's very real and powerful but it ought to be fought instead of given into with a shrug and a „what is good, anyway? Maybe the demon called Modernity favors herbivore-men ... who am I to judge?“

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If we had angels in the form of "highest types of people" to rule us, what would they need money for anyway?

Plato's philosopher kings were forbidden from owning property, after all.

As magick for controlling the cattle.

That money should be reserved for the highest types of people

Such as, for example, yourself?

Nah, I'd happily keep my current SES in exchange for getting to enact my ideal policy. If the group includes me I'd be fine to be excluded, because the idea is more important than my wallet. Same with eugenics, it's not about my reproduction, it's about the future of humanity.

Funny no one ever says this about finance bros, eh? (Who appear to prefer the 11/10 Russian hotties)

The finance bros who are any good at it tend to prefer a low-drama 8 to a high-drama 11. The only person I worked with who actually dated eastern European models was more of an upjumped computer programmer than an actual finance bro.

The English traditional elite produces a lot of not-too-smart daughters who fit the bill re. looks and drama potential and know that they are at risk of downward mobility if they don't marry money. A lot of my colleagues dated hot primary school teachers. There is some overlap between these groups.

You're talking about actual dating, I'm talking about hiring escorts.

People hate finance bros too are you kidding.

People hate finance bros, sure. But they don't think it's unreasonable for them to have money; those who have this "wealth by profession" idea never think it's wrong for finance people to have money. It's often blue collar people (for an old example of this attitude there was an episode of Frasier where the title character was upset that his plumber had "the big Mercedes"), professional sports players, surgeons, or tech people.

And of course I knew BC was a finance bro too.

It's sarcasm. BC is saying there is too much money and attitude in tech bro circles while being a finance bro with too much money and attitude. (Can't comment on his taste in whores, though.)

Ah, I didn't compute BC was a finance bro.

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week.

Amen to that, man. I've been pretty resentful about some of my life choices regarding choosing a pro-social and highly-stable career path over higher-risk options, and it's really been hitting how much those choices... suck.

Living well is its own reward, so they say, but it sure doesn't feel like it in the moment.

Eh, this is like being impressed that mid-level football players make millions of dollars. Yes, but the vast majority of football players make zero dollars and work other jobs. A tiny slice of the total sex professions make any amount of real money. Most camgirls make less than their costs. Most street hookers get paid nothing but board and drugs. A small number of exceptionally lucky, good looking, motivated or well-placed sex workers will make a career, be it in camming, prostitution, porn, stripping etc. Most of these will be too dysfunctional to do anything with the money. Some tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction will have the combination of luck, talent, skills, vision and sheer freakiness to make any real money, accumulate wealth and rise in status because of that.

I think that your analogy is good, but not perfect, because in sports there is actually a rather objective measure of performance. The sport stars who make millions will generally crush amateurs.

With sex workers, just like with with movie actors or wine bottles, there is no clear objective comparison between competitors. It is the realm of taste and fame, whose assignment is illegible.

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country.

I remember that we've discussed the same issue before. I'd refer to my argument here, if you don't mind.

Two further points on my part: I doubt that Thailand counts as an 'extremely cheap country' anymore. Also, moving to an extremely cheap country as a lone Western man is very likely to make you the target of local scammers and other criminals, of which there will be plenty.

Thailand's still pretty cheap compared to most Western options (Bangkok will cost you but you're also getting a pretty global-level city for that cost and it's still far cheaper than most equivalents in terms of amenities and breadth of experiences available). Not my favorite option in the region personally but it's fine.

In grand scheme of things these whores like aella are the very bottom of intellectual courtesans. They are vastly overshadowed by lovers of powerful men who can amass properties, jewels or even yachts and other luxury items worth much more - cases such as Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, who was a lover of King of Spain and recieved property in Marakesh and $70 million in literal direct wire transfer. And even those are of course nothing compared to wealthy divorcees such as Bezo's ex wife MacKenzie Scott. There are many more such cases such as Jocelyn Wildenstein who got $3.8 billion divorce settlement etc. If you look in top 100 wealthiest women, almost 80% inherited their wealth often from deceased spouses. Only around 14 of them are self-made. It is almost inverse of men, who are almost 80% self-made billionaires. This is how things simply work for women.

Bezos' wife was paid because she wasn't a whore or a lover. She was a real partner. If anyone "deserves" to get such a large share of their spouse's earnings it's probably her.

It really is the best case scenario for the feminist divorce laws at this level of wealth. It wasn't like he married a model who counted the hours until she could get the biggest payoff.

This is just wordplay. In that sense even Aella is not just a lover or a whore, she is partner of sorts for powerful, intellectually stimulating them toward higher success. Maybe she also "deserves" billions of dollars. The word "deserves" carries a lot of weight here, even today there are countries where divorcees do not get shit when it comes to wealth - the whole Middle East and North Africa for instance. Similar rules exist for widows, where wealth is inherited by closest male relatives. All these countries apparently decided that wives do not deserve shit.

The point stands. Golddiging under various circumstances is highly profitable for women, even an utter bimbo without any hard skills outside of seduction can amass huge wealth and power that way. That is in fact vast majority of cases how women do it all around the world.

This is just wordplay. In that sense even Aella is not just a lover or a whore, she is partner of sorts for and powerful, intellectually stimulating them toward higher success.

No, this is the wordplay. Comparing a person in a monogamous marriage for more than a decade through your hard times and providing material support to a whore you rented for thousands an hour after you already became rich is not really credible. We've been allowing whores to make this argument in public without laughing them out of the room for too long.

I come from an Islamic society, I have no problem with the idea that women's upside in divorce should be capped. But those are polygamous societies.

But that's not the sort of society Bezos got married in. In the one he did, monogamy is the law and women are considered partners in a more substantial sense by both the feminists and Christians, even if they manage it differently. It's doubtful that Western civilization has suffered from treating the one wife as more important and precious, even if the idea of giving away half your earnings to someone now incentivized to take it is galling.

The point stands. Golddiging under various circumstances is highly profitable for women, even an utter bimbo without any hard skills outside of seduction can amass huge wealth and power that way. That is in fact vast majority of cases how women do it all around the world.

Yes, sure? First off: a lot of men do that to themselves. Men chase these women like they chase them. Bezos chose to abandon the wife of his youth for a sexpot despite knowing the costs.

Second, I said this was the best case argument precisely because that's just not Mackenzie Scott's bio.

But that's not the sort of society Bezos got married in. In the one he did, monogamy is the law and women are considered partners in a more substantial sense by both the feminists and Christians, even if they manage it differently. It's dubious if Western civilization has suffered from treating the one wife as more important and precious, even if the idea of giving away half your earnings to someone now incentivized to take it is galling.

There are two different arguments here. On one level, we can look at relationship between man and woman overall, which ranges from whores, suggar babies/daddies, friends with benefits, situationships, cohabitation, common-law marriage to secular marriage or religious marriage and many other forms between. The modern secular western view constantly blurs difference between these relationships, just look at so called toothbrush case from Australia 16 years ago. So if a regular escort like Aella has toothbrush in your home, she can be your defacto wife. That is the actual legal minimum when a whore "deserves" half of your wealth for her "partnership", so who are we kidding here.

I as a Catholic also agree with you, but I am also much more strict even than many of my fellow believers. I do not consider anything other than religious marriage as such, I do not see a point why should I in any way respect the aforementioned bastardization of this sacred institution. I do not care about "she is my monogamous partner" and other such nonsense - including divorced couples - which is something that should not happen in the first place. It is all just heathens doing their depraved shit, up and including gay "marriages" and various polycules and some such. I take it as a wordgame, where degenerates appropriated the word and completely inverted its meaning beyond recognition, transforming it to something completely different as usual. To me it is all just cohabitation in some concubinage and people having basically business contracts between themselves, especially if you include various semi-crazy prenups. Again, it is a farce.

So I do not see any issues for me to hold both of these points. If a supposed believer divorces her husband, she automatically falls under category of oathbreaker and I cannot find any sympathy for any case of how she deserves wealth for some vague concept of "partnership", that is not a standard I recognize or respect. The fact is, that she herself turned her sacred marriage into moneygrabbing operation as opposed to acting according to her duties.

I work in elder care myself - can you expand on why you feel negatively about it? I tend to agree that it would be bad for a huge proportion of the population to be involved in it, and that mostly relates to concerns about the birth rate and demographics, but insofar as the elderly population is growing, needing more people to look after them seems inevitable. Lifespans are increasing and medical care is improving, so the number of elderly people is also going to increase.

Unless one wants to bite the bullet and say that increased life expectancies are bad, and it would be better if more people died at 70, there are going to be more elderly people, and through no moral failing of anybody, they will need care. What is your preferred response?

Have more controls on provision of medical care to the elderly when it's not passing any cost/benefit calculation especially on public purse. Bump the retirement age substantially upwards for public assistance since an increasingly vanishing minority are working jobs with any real physical toll.

If you want to self-fund your tilting with death sure but incentives are currently massively misaligned

It's really great you're going to be thirty years old forever and maximally economically productive and will never get old or sick and will never be replaced in your job, so you are never going to need home helps, healthcare services, or a pension. Unlike those old useless seventy years onwards people selfishly requiring doctors to treat their arthritis and pneumonia, the leeches!

Publicly funded retirement is a privilege. The line needs to be kept at a point that enables society's books to be balanced. 65 made sense when a comparatively small fraction made it there and massively costly medical interventions weren't a thing.

If you want to stop working either have enough kids or get enough money that you're not on the public purse.

Publicly funded retirement is a privilege

In the US at least, social security and medicare is an entitlement. You essentially earn "points" (not literally but figuratively works similar) in the program the more taxes you pay into it while working, and then come time of retirement or disability you get benefits paid out based off how many "points" you have.

There is an implicit, and in many ways explicit, agreement that this is earned. Some people try to argue against that by pointing that the cash you get out isn't the same cash you put in, but that doesn't actually change anything in the agreement. Money is fungible, it doesn't matter where it comes from whether it got stored in a big bank over the 40+ years of work or it went to seniors of the time and the money comes from workers today, the seniors of today earned their "points" in the benefits system and want to see the obligations promised to them by the government fulfilled.

The correct answer to this was for the government to never make such a promise to being with, not to rip people off.

It's not that it's not literally the same coins, it's that people get out more than they put in. It was not earned, in the most literal way.

Specifically, the report found that a single man who earned the average wage ($66,100 in 2023 dollars) every year of his adult life before retiring in 2020 at age 65, would have paid about $466,000 in taxes into the Social Security and Medicare systems, but can expect to receive benefits equal to $640,000—or an additional $174,000—over the course of his retirement.

A single female with average earnings ($66,100 in 2023 dollars) retiring in 2020 at age 65 would pay $466,000 in taxes but is likely collect $722,000 in benefits.

https://401kspecialistmag.com/social-security-taxes-vs-benefits-americans-take-far-more-out-than-they-pay-in/

The imbalance is mostly driven by medicare; social security is much closer to breaking-even or even losing you money if you are a high earner, although married couples get more under certain conditions.

Ultimately the scheme was designed in such a way as to rip off the taxpayers of the future to promise gibs now. Those future taxpayers are all grown up and recognise that they are being ripped off and that the economics are going to leave them holding the bag.

It's not that it's not literally the same coins, it's that people get out more than they put in.

I also get more out of many investments than I put in, I'm still entitled to it.

Ultimately the scheme was designed in such a way as to rip off the taxpayers of the future to promise gibs now. Those future taxpayers are all grown up and recognise that they are being ripped off and that the economics are going to leave them holding the bag.

Absolutely. I agree with you that it was a terrible idea and should never have been done this way. It also was done this way, and government should not renege on promises if it can be helped.

Even the most principled small government activists came asking for their share like Ayn Rand. Some leftists tend to say that she was a hypocrite for this, but I disagree. You can believe that taxing your money is a bad idea and also accept that ultimately they did tax your money and want them to fulfill the promises they made.

I also get more out of many investments than I put in, I'm still entitled to it.

You're entitled to those because you own the investment vehicle.

government should not renege on promises if it can be helped.

It can't be helped without cannibalizing the ~entire economy for Medicare and SS.

Of course, they’d make more if they could invest the cash in the market.

I find this hard to believe if it were generalized. Regardless of the financial vehicle people choose for their retirement, the actual amount of physical resources and labor to fulfill their demands doesn't really change. The material burden caused by 40% of society being unable to work isn't alleviated in any way if all of those people are nominal millionaires due to their portfolios' appreciation over time, prices for elder care, cruises in the Caribbean, the local retirement home's weekly Bingo event etc. would simply adjust upwards according to the actual amount of working age people being able to deliver these things.

Society can't collectively out-save demographic change. The stock market or government pension schemes are different ways to save money, but they're just saving nonetheless, not material solutions to the actual issue. Individually, investing is obviously still the way to go as long as there are enough suckers unaware of or not engaging with these better financial options, but that just elevates your relative standing, it's not a solution for society as a whole.

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Only if you automate an index fund & ignore it. Most active investors lose money over time.

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Yeah but the government sets forth with many entitlement and implicit vibes then takes them away arbitrarily. End of the day the system has to balance financially somewhat. The seniors of today didn't accumulate sufficient points to get the age target they wanted and it's better to make common sense shifts now rather than be forced through austerity or the day of the pillow in future

I think the best option is to simply raise the retirement age. There wasn't some big reason for it to be at 65, that was just the age of the federal railroad pensions. And they already raised it before, the full retirement age now is 67.

If there's any age it should be set at, it should be one where a substantial number of people are no longer able to be meaningfully employed. That way it is truly an insurance for old age, as the name implies. That more and more people are continuing to work while collecting benefits is proof that the age is not set properly for insurance purposes.

People who are crippled early can collect disability benefits as a form of early retirement, something we already did unintentionally back during the great recession.

Note that you'd need to raise the retirement age to, like, 75 in order to avert insolvency if that's the only thing you're doing.

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If there's any age it should be set at, it should be one where a substantial number of people are no longer able to be meaningfully employed.

Things are going to get really interesting when AI reverses the direction of this and brings it down from 67 to roughly 20 (ironically the highest current age at which someone finds jokes about 6-7 to be funny), as the only form of employment available to anyone becomes the original form of employment. Then again, improving cosmetic surgery and sun protection might mean that the age goes back up and/or just remains stable before going up to the 100s.

If you want to stop working either have enough kids or get enough money that you're not on the public purse.

This is called "altering the deal". Anyway, aren't you one of those who swears that old people's saved money is no good and they should actually have to personally provide for themselves in their dotage, or have their kids do so?

This is called "altering the deal".

"We made a deal, but you never signed it or voted for it because it was before you were born, but don't worry about how much it's costing you because you'll get paid back by other people who still haven't been born, except of course that the demographic pyramid is now much taller and upside down and our accountants say there's no way you can't get mostly stiffed. Are you really saying you want to alter that deal?"

I believe the appropriate counter-meme here is the "Yes Chad".

I'm probably near enough to the peak "going to get screwed when the younger people wise up" age that I certainly can't be happy about the situation, but it is what it is.

I'm a bit of an AI doomer, but if we're going to insist that someone to do all our work and pay for our leisure without deciding to just let us all die instead, I think creating AGI to ask might still give us better odds than asking the ever-shrinking younger generations of First World countries. And just in case that Fully Automated Luxury Geriatric Space Welfare-Capitalism plan remains mere fantasy for too long, in the meantime it might be a wise idea to back off on the massive debt-funded entitlements gradually, before we add too much more risk that our creditors will decide to back off suddenly. In the worst case, there might be so much of a backlash that the "saved money is no good" contingent actually gets into power. It's dismaying how many young Americans hold favorable views of socialism, but if they perceive the status quo as "socialism, just not for you" then I can see how they might imagine they'd be upgrading.

The real risk to old people is bringing in a bunch of third worlders who then have to support the old people who the immigrants have no connection to which in a democracy means the olds gibs will get voted away.

Seems to be mostly anti-immigration types trying to cut off social security. Immigrants seem to be generally for all gibs.

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The people who want to cut off Social Security for "boomers" (really Xers) and who want to take the houses of old people because they aren't using them appropriately are pretty much the same. The group which thinks old people's money is no good and if you aren't working now, you shouldn't be able to pay for things is a subset of them. You can't appease them (or anyone, really); victory anywhere would only embolden them. Otherwise I'd be more open to cutting off SS.

The Xers are already showing serious creaks in the structure. Anybody looking at an age distribution chart has to be very alarmed.

If an old person is totally self-funding their retirement and has an expensive house I have no malice to them. I do suspect they might be happier moving into a purpose-built assisted living community someplace with cheaper land values, but that's their choice. The issue becomes when massive subsidies, far exceeding the individual's lifetime contribution are piled on somebody who is also holding a very valuable asset which is increasingly happening.

I think that we should try to still give old people a decent retirement within our means, but it has to be kept in mind that this was boomers making a deal among themselves that now doesn't work out due to their own foreseeable failings. It's really hard for me to feel sympathy for a generation that went through a boom period with a 10-to-1 dependency ratio now not getting what they promised themselves because the dependency ratio is now 2.5-to-1.

The "deal" is older than the Boomers. And any cutting-off won't fall on most of the boomers; the reality of numbers and the speed of politics means it'll be Generation X which is cut off, plus maybe a few of the youngest boomers.

Yes that's true. Which is why most young people are quite militant since they know it's an inevitability that their personal access to the luxury communism will likely be killed off before they get to harvest a cent

The deal is going to be altered regardless. The Boomer block is still 5-10 years off peak demographic overhang and the system is already cracking. Public funded retirement can continue to exist but either age or provision of care needs to be shifted till the books somewhat balance.

Should we distinguish between medical care, and elder care in general? It's often somewhat blurry, since aged care facilities are at least partially medicalised, but I am thinking about people in their 80s and up who, for example, need assistance showering and toileting, who cannot make their own meals, who need to be accompanied for walks or activities due to high falls risk, who might be on anti-depressants or some other prescription to help cope with cognitive decline and need assistance taking their medication on schedule, and so on.

I would hope we can agree that people in that vulnerable condition should be cared for. Alternatives like "letting them die", or "trusting that families can always take care of them (they can't)", or even something truly drastic and inhumane like "euthanasia for everyone at 75" are going to either produce tremendous innocent suffering, or are radically contrary to most people's moral instincts.

It seems to me that firstly we want some sort of system to provide care for vulnerable elders, secondly we want that system to be well-funded and not an excessive drain on the public purse, and thirdly we want people to work in that system and provide the required care. Of these, the difficult, controversial part is the second one. Maybe tinkering around things like the retirement age is a reasonable step to take; I'm not particularly inclined to argue if you want to bump the retirement age up a year or two. Australia recently bumped it up to 67. There was that recent dispute about this in France.

But I also wanted to say, in response to ThomasDelVasto's comment about "wiping the asses of boomers", that I think that aged care is a necessary and honourable profession.

Alternatives like "letting them die", or "trusting that families can always take care of them (they can't)", or even something truly drastic and inhumane like "euthanasia for everyone at 75" are going to either produce tremendous innocent suffering, or are radically contrary to most people's moral instincts.

Anti-old policies have a greater issue than just morals for unknown vulnerable strangers. Basically everyone has someone old in their life they love (I have both parents and an aunt) who are still independent right now but might not be in the next decade or two and it's something I really am having to plan for.

But beyond even that, while younger folk like me might want to deny it we are all aware we will get old as well. Voting in anti old policies is moronic then, it's literally voting against my future self. Euthanasia at 75 means I die at 75, and that's assuming the number doesn't ratchet down.

Sure my adult children might be able to care for me but more and more people don't like that, they don't like being independent on their kids and I don't like the idea either. Funding it through taxes on everyone essentially does the same thing, my kids pay a little for every senior and all the other kids will pay a little for me.

Really the bigger answer is automation and zoning reform. We can raise our overall quality of life despite shrinking and aging populations because robots do the labor (as automation has already been doing for a few centuries now) and zoning reform can help create accessible nice homes for the old to move to so young people with kids can have an actual house.

The issue with this is that elder care-related consumption is reaching a relative share of all expenses that it's starting to eat up all the headroom for robotics or general investment in productive capital. And in that sense, anti-old policies need not be moronic, even for someone who is well aware that they're going to be old one day too. It's better to cut down expenses now and focus them into the things that will ensure the continued ability of the economy to produce goods and services at a sufficient level well into the future where I want to retire too at some point, than to feed the seed corn to the gerontocracy utility monster that we've collectively built in the West and watch society come crashing down as a consequence.

Case in point: here in Germany, even though state spending as a total share of GDP has grown quite slowly in past decades, inside that state spending welfare has greatly displaced capital investment, and while a tiny share of that change is related to stuff like migration and a general propensity towards ever greater gibs, it's basically 100% down to our aging society. It's no coincidence that we have collapsing bridges in major cities, but pensions continually increase above inflation even as the share of pensioners increases.

I'm not convinced this really is a solvable problem.

Lifespan has increased without meaningfully increasing the amount of healthy years. Age of retirement can be raised a bit but we're starting to hit hard limits of what is possible (at least for the general population, some jobs can be done by some groups of elderly more reliably).

It isn't really a problem insurance or redistribution can solve because this is something that happens to everyone and welfare states are already stretched to the limit and running massive deficits. This is a demographic and biological problem, not a redistribute one.

A stop gap measure is probably increasing the retirement age where possible and cutting back on non-essential elderly entitlements but at some point we have to ask ourselves what we're doing here.

Let's say we treated this as savings instead and people got a an account of money at retirement that they can spend on healthcare, assisted living and pension; what do we do when that money runs out? That's the situation we're getting into societally, regardless of whether we have insurance based or socialised systems.

We have no treatment for aging so no-one is getting out of this alive, and that is something we as a modern society have to come to terms with. Our current attitude is more than a little childish, imo.

Hopefully AGI really comes and solves aging for us or this is going to get ugly.

We don't need to solve aging, we just need to automate enough work that good living standards can be maintained despite a shrinking and aging population. Like does it really matter if the seniors at a nursing home get their food cooked by a sweaty 16 year old vs a (possibly even higher and more consistent quality) automated cooking machine? Does it really matter if the medical treatment and analysis they get is done by (possibly even higher and more consistent quality) machines and not extensive human labor?

Not really.

In many sectors "build another machine" is already far more efficient than throwing another human laborer in (to the point some run lights out/near lights out), so birthrates and youth stop mattering for them as much. As we automate more and more, this will become increasingly true of the general economy.

That would be nice but I'll believe it when I see it.

That would be nice but I'll believe it when I see it.

I cleverly used examples that we already have (at least to some degree).

Automated food production? Already the case for many steps and products, both at the farms themselves, and in preparing/packaging/etc. Combine this with self driving trucks (self driving cars are already looking better than humans like with Waymo, probably not too long for the trucking industry to start getting more automated) and even stuff like drone deliveries from store to house, and maybe in 20-30 years there will barely be any humans involved in getting food from the fields to your home. Heck, you might not even be a part of that process, COVID has made grocery deliveries really cheap and I use them from time to time and that's with human drivers still not the drones yet.

Medical care? Ok sure a lot of it will remain human, patients will want a human doctor to talk to and a human nurse to look after them but automation is already here and getting better. In all sorts of ways even. Like I got a sleep study recently and all the devices they put on me could read my pulse, detect my breathing, etc without a human monitor. And an auto generated report from what I can tell! Yes a human was there to set it up and look over it, and an expert looked the results and the report but it was mostly technology.

Heck technology even makes a lot of things possible that wouldn't be before. Consider the sleep study again and how they had constant monitoring of my pulse and breathing and oxygen levels. A human doctor, even if they taped their end of a stethoscope to me and listened all night long wouldn't be able to record with nearly as much accuracy as the machine can.

Now of course, automation still has a long way to go. But given the miracles we have already achieved and the amazing standards of living we already get from it, I don't think we should be so doubtful.

Heck one of the only reasons why automation hasn't already solved the crisis is that our living standards keep ratcheting up to match the increase in productivity. Like we're at the point where internet is being considered a basic human right despite most not even having it ~30-40 years ago. Imagine going back to the 1980s and telling people the Internet will be considered a human right. Many would be like "whats the internet?". That's how much we've ratcheted.

You realise of course that even with these inventions we're falling further behind, as does the derivative and in some places even the second order derivative.

The scale of the improvements are not commensurate with the worsening dependency ratios.

True. I have more faith in the Chinese having the will and the ingenuity to actually accomplish this but the current meta in the West is awash with so much inefficiency and stupidity that it cannot last without alterations.

I'm sure a better scalable approach to eldercare exists but the current trajectory seems ill equipped to arrive there

Another aspect not many people talk about when discussing this issue is that the elderly are currently sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of underused real estate. Downgrading from a 3 bedroom suburban home with a quarter acre of property to a 2 bedroom condo in a lower cost of living area can finance a hell of a lot of health care. The boomers need to sell their fucking houses and get some of that wealth working again. Social security and medicare payments should be halved for every spare bedroom in your home.

Downgrading from a 3 bedroom suburban home with a quarter acre of property to a 2 bedroom condo in a lower cost of living area can finance a hell of a lot of health care.

No, it really can't. You'd think so, but transaction costs are high, condo fees are high, and healthcare is hellaciously expensive.

Also ridiculous carveouts in the current pension system. Australia doesn't count the house you live in towards mean testing for public assistance, pension and healthcare so there's a lot of instances where elderly are deliberately sitting on premium real estate (that they don't maintain at all) solely to potentially give it as future inheritance.

I'm reminded of an elderly couple near me growing up where their kids lived an hour away since the suburb had massively appreciated who made their own retirements significantly worse (due to transit and rarely seeing grandkids) by refusing to leave their literally rotting home

Old age social security benefits in the US are not means tested. This is a weight-bearing component of the system -- it's funded by a special tax on all workers, and provided to all those who paid into it. That's what keeps it from just being considered plain old welfare, and what makes it the "third rail" of politics.

As for occupied houses literally rotting in Australia... isn't the country generally rather dry for that? Even in my wet area of the US, if you avoid being flooded from below and keep the roof from leaking, and don't set it on fire, the house will be OK structurally for a very long time.

Also, a couple holding onto a house to keep the health care system from getting it rather than their children goes against the narrative of greedy elders who don't care about their children.

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If they all start selling then prices will drop because people don't have the money to buy the real estate absent inherited real estate wealth.

Which solves another problem! Win/win!

Ohno. Premium real estate drops a bit in pricing and transit issues get mitigated.

The point is that it isn't a good source of funding. Much of the value is illusory.

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to a two-bedroom condo in a lower-cost-of-living area

Or to a 500-ft2 ADU in the backyard.

Seriously. Unleash the granny flats! Make multi-generational households great again!

Exactly. I've moved from a nuclear family society to a clannish one and the elderly tend to have better QOL through granny flats and staying inside the home

The meaningful amount of healthy years has expanded hugely? 70 in 2026 isn't what it was in 1970 due to a combination of jobs being far less physically arduous and public health interventions. 65 was picked as a line when most people didn't get there, they were profoundly wrecked on average and there wasn't an expectation of 10 years of meandering cruises.

But yeah the retirement age needs to be a function of where the books can be balanced. If you were incapable of generating enough savings or children to get you there, moving it onto the public purse is ruinous

Not compared to the increase in lifespan. Where people used to die at 65 they now are inching close to 85 (84.1 in Sweden where i live), and few people even in light professions can work to 70, nevermind more than that. I'm not saying that they necessarily need active care at that point but neither are they fit to work, and consume increasing amounts of resources. I Grant you that we might be able to squeeze some work out of them but we can't just increase the retirement age either.

Of course there are exceptions like my wife's grandfather who worked into his mid 90s.

The average 70 year old these days is more fit to work at the typical job of 2026 than the average 65 year old was at the typical job in the early 1900s when public pensions were brought in and 65 was set as the interval for their payment. You are frankly insane if you think that, as a somewhat-young person, that the retirement age will be where it currently is when you're old enough to get there barring some huge luxury AI communism innovation in the meantime. The system is already buckling before the majority of boomers are even retired, medicine will likely continue to improve and unless there is an immediate reversal in the birthrate issue there won't be a large enough pyramid beneath you.

That is literally what I said in my first comment?

There have always been sex workers who out earned me. Not very many of them, however, the typical prostitute does not earn very much(and her job is crazy dangerous, has terrible hours, and is likely extraordinarily unpleasant for much of it). Most sex workers live in poverty, the OF numbers are crazy.

These ladies are capitalizing on the fact that there is a limited number of young, attractive women with master's degrees willing to be pleasant to shy nerds making little effort for them, and very few of those will do so for money.

the typical prostitute does not earn very much (and her job is crazy dangerous, has terrible hours

The numbers will be different in places where prostitution is legal, though. 200 dollars per hour is a lot, though that number obviously does not take into account downtime, the brothel's cut of the revenue (one document indicates that it's 50 percent), etc.

I live in the Bay Area and work in a department where a lot of the men here are cheating on their spouses. I’ve been invited to participate in the same activities but denied it. Some of them are “Asian massage parlor” styled locations with the windows completely blacked out from the inside ($120 an hour from what I’m told). The other is an online escort service where you can see pics of these girls and things are handled through a WhatsApp phone number and they only do same day and time appointments; nothing with advance notice ($180-$280 an hour). And to become a client, they require you to text them a copy of your drivers license/ID and need two references of people who have already used their service (so it’s referral based, hence how co-workers play into this).

A lot of these guys I’m friends with and they’re otherwise good people, but my personal opinion of the lot of them has definitely dropped in some areas. You want to visit an escort service? Fine. You want to cheat on your spouse and potentially ruin your family? Fuck you.

You want to visit an escort service? Fine. You want to cheat on your spouse and potentially ruin your family? Fuck you.

I mean to a certain degree the fencing-off of these activities to pay-for-play gives incentives for everybody involved to keep it as transactional as possible and stop it snowballing into family-ruining consequences. I'm not particularly interested in using such services (though more since I just don't find paying for sex sexy than out of any particular moral condemnation) but I'm in a culture where it's a pretty open secret that a lot of middle-aged men have girlfriends or take boys trips a ton, and it kinda keeps things ticking over? It'd probably be better if they guys kept things in their pants (though then you've got to argue what obligations the wives have with regards to sexual availability) and Lou Pai stripper impregnations do happen but a certain level of circumspect whoring just seems to be pretty Lindy throughout human history. A lot of cultures don't really consider it 'cheating' in the same way that they'd handle somebody having an affair with a co-worker or neighbor.

Then there's unbillable hours like finding clients, travel, maintenance of looks, etc. Some clients might reimburse these admin hours and some might not. No health insurance and no 401K match plan. Money is usually untaxed so that's a big plus, but it's probably hard to get a mortgage with this type of cash income.

Not very many of them, however, the typical prostitute does not earn very much(and her job is crazy dangerous, has terrible hours, and is likely extraordinarily unpleasant for much of it). Most sex workers live in poverty, the OF numbers are crazy.

Yeah, people have a bad habit of comparing their salaried work to the top earners in professions with extremely high variance in outcomes. Like, sure, Scarlett Johansson makes absurd amounts of money, but the modal actor or actress is not making much money at all.

As I've argued before (using the specific examples of OnlyFans and careers in the entertainment industry), alternative lifestyle choices work great – for alternative people.

I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

Here's how they feel: Integrity is its own reward, as is chastity. Hope those girls know how to save; their half-life is short. Also they better be exceptionally fine at fellating for those fees.

Someday this will all be written about. The courtesans of old Japan (花魁) had many ranks, all the way down to what today might be called lot lizards at truck stops. And all the way up to women rivalling (if perhaps not equalling) the geiko, who were technically not prostitutes but could play your emotions like a shamisen.

These gals in Silicon valley are carving out their own crass niche, if in what seems a disorganized fashion, which will ultimately probably be their undoing. Then again who knows. Anyway I feel like sausage and eggs for breakfast.

I have heard the argument that it is modernity/technology that has made the incomes of young women equal or exceed the incomes of young men. But another theory is that young women always had the potential to earn more than the median young man, through prostitution or soft-sex work -- dancing, prostitution, hostessing, courtesans. Soft-sex work or serial monogamous prostitution. However, societies that survived greatly limited women's ability to enter these trades or to profit from those trades. So what is new right now, is not technology, but a change in societal norms. And even these norms are not "new", they are frequently seen during the decline stages of empires...

You need wealth inequality at extremes to make this true. Which I guess we have now. More extreme wealth inequality means that guys with a 100 billion can just pay a lot of whores a lot of money and it’s completely trivial to them.

So what is new right now, is not technology, but a change in societal norms. And even these norms are not "new", they are frequently seen during the decline stages of empires...

Technology does play a role. We have condoms, the pill, antibiotics, cell phones, and a whole host of things that make it much safer to be a prostitute these days.

Humanity will always have the oldest profession, but we really are living in a technological golden age for prostitutes, where a ton of the risk has been taken out of it, though obviously not all of it.

Ironically in the long-term it’s going to strengthen the vectors for diseases to spread.

I feel like the incentives of sexwork towards not getting pregnant/obviously fucked up with bad STDs (Yes, there is a bottom tier where people are less discerning) makes it less of an issue than the good people of Grindr who are going absolutely uncompensated and engaging in wild frivolous acts with randoms.

Most sex workers make very little, the fact that a woman can now earn a solidly average salary as a teacher is a genuine change.

I imagine a streetwalker working on Figueroa St. in Los Angeles is making $40 off one client. How that compares to someone who works at some place like the Mustang Ranch in Nevada, who knows.

Anyone consistently taking home 30k over a weekend should feel ZERO need to advertise that fact, trebly so if they're in a dubiously legal occupation. They should not want to invite competition, especially from potentially more attractive ladies.

Likewise, such a person would probably not want the attention this could bring to her clients, both for competitive reasons and for their own confidentiality. Its more accepted to do this kind of disclosure either anonymously or as a post-retirement memoir, no?

Conclusion: maybe ONE guy paid her 30k, ONCE, and maybe for some particularly lurid scenario or there were some other expenses involved or whatever. She's using that to set her price negotiations with any future Johns aggressively in her favor.

I'm skeptical of taking MUCH from this about the larger escort scene in SF, although I'm willing to believe, given the gender ratios (to say nothing of sexualities) I've heard predominate out there that any cishet guy with decent Testosterone levels and hundreds of thousands/millions of tech dollars in his pocket would try to find an outlet.

This article is likely an ad. Not even heavily disguised I'd say.

If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society?

There's a valid read on this from the AI/Economic Anxiety perspective though, yes. Tech bros are an ascendant class purely on the backs of very new wealth and the appearance that they'll 'own' the future (maybe not literally) on current trajectories, so their status is likely to keep on rising if they don't get unceremoniously displaced by their own product.

And so the two broad sectors of Western economies that are 'thriving' are anything that directly caters to wealthy boomers (or not-so-wealthy, given how much the government spends on them too), or anything that is closely related to AI development. (Finance is doing fine too, but that's not so interesting).

The up-and-coming generation would not be wrong to notice they can trade in significant amounts of dignity and personal autonomy to siphon some of the wealth those particular beneficiaries without having to actually break through into such classes. But 10-15 years of doing so just for a shot at getting enough financial independence to never have to degrade yourself again is kind of bleak to contemplate from this side of it.

Anyone consistently taking home 30k over a weekend should feel ZERO need to advertise that fact, trebly so if they're in a dubiously legal occupation.

If at least some of that is declared income (and if they're smart, they won't mess with the IRS), then they have to explain how it was earned. "I'm a hooker" clearly won't do, so they'll have to claim it is for consultancy services or the likes, hence having a day job or former day job to explain where all this extra money is coming from would be smart, and they'd have to be some level of intelligent to pull that off.

The IRS allows you to declare "other income" without giving its source. The catch is you can't deduct expenses against it.

Would they not be interested if you declare "no job, no income from employment, but I'm getting all this money from somewhere else"? It strikes me that is the kind of "hmm, is there maybe criminal activity going on here?" that would attract some notice.

By law the IRS is not allowed to refer you to other law enforcement agencies based on your tax return. I'm sure they do anyway at least sometimes, though, but going after whores probably isn't worth it to them.

I was curious, because recent tightening-up of regulations has meant more annoying paperwork around work bank accounts where we have to solemnly swear (and sign this form here, here, and here) that we are not, in fact, money-laundering or doing other naughty no-no things. So I wondered if "no visible means of support but thousands going into my bank account" would not attract the same kind of attention.

I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

I could be wrong, but I imagine that the average blue-collar worker probably thinks of ultra-high-price escorts as being kinda cool, weird, and glamorous rather than resenting them. It's the same with athletes and entertainers. The average blue-collar worker would direct a bit of occasional grouchy complaining towards them for being supposedly overpaid, but would have no genuine hate in his heart toward them. He can see how they directly provide obvious value to people through various kinds of entertainment. And when it comes to prostitutes, there is the added factor that they are doing a job that the blue-collar worker imagines to be very unpleasant. His resentment toward prostitutes would be largely limited to the subset of prostitutes who do morally dubious things like chase NBA players with the key intent of getting pregnant by them.

I wouldn't be surprised if the blue-collar worker actually felt more animosity toward well-paid white-collar workers whom he imagines (largely accurately) sit on chairs all day long doing arcane corporate bullshit that has unclear tangible value.

That said, the blue-collar worker might well feel resentful of the ultra-high-price escort if her clients are people he feels animosity toward for being supposedly wimpy: highly paid tech workers instead of finance bros, for example.

To be fair, this is largely me going off of vibes I feel like I've picked up in real life and online, not based on any actual data. So I could be totally wrong.

We dislike certain white collar occupations(consultants, ambulance chasers, etc) but recognize the masses of accountants and customer service representatives as having real jobs; we see prostitutes in the same category as drug dealers, loansharks, and other dubiously legal occupations. You're correct that we don't particularly resent them, although we might resent obviously overcharged clients if they're seen as doing things that provide no value to the world for having the money to spend.

Thanks for providing an actual blue collar perspective.

we see prostitutes in the same category as drug dealers, loansharks, and other dubiously legal occupations

Consensus building. I for one do not see them that way. I do not think there is anything bad about prostitution per se. About half the adult humans have a much stronger sex drive than the other half, and unfortunately are mostly interested in sex with that less interested half. A lot of ink has been spilled about the decline of romantic relationships, but for our purposes it is enough to assert that humanity was shaped by the uncaring forces of evolution and now finds itself in an environment way out of the training distribution.

Sure, sex with a sex worker will never be maximally wholesome, it would always be more wholesome to find some partner who is just enthusiastic about sex with you. But this is the perfect (but probably unachievable) being the enemy of the good.

The same argument has been made about semaglutide, actually. "But would it not be much more wholesome if you changed your diet on your own and exercised?" Fuck that.

I see prostitution more on a moral level with theme parks, not meth labs. There are probably some hardcore cosplayers who view Disney parades -- where people simply walk around in some Mickey Mouse costume because that is their day job -- rather because they feel deeply drawn to become that character -- as an abomination. And others might say that theme parks are fine, but roller coasters are the devil's work, and humans should just be happy to experience 9.81m/s^2 towards a fixed direction as God intended, or might claim that most actually existing theme parks are ecological disasters and lead to animal suffering. Or decry the commercialism of all of it. But in the end, theme parks are not inherently evil. They simply offer the fulfillment of normal human drives (e.g. for excitement and adventure) for money. If capitalism can be trusted to deliver your daily bread, why should you not also trust it to deliver a fun day for your family?

Whenever we say "this thing is sacred, it shall not be traded for profane goods" (e.g. for sex, but also for the saving of a human life, or a kidney), that tends to create outcomes which are just further from the Pareto frontier.

Consensus building.

Not really. "We" here is a reference to the kind of blue-collar worker @Goodguy was talking about (i.e. someone who puts a lot of their identity into being the kind of person who works hard in a physically demanding job), a demographic which is underrepresented here. If @hydroacetylene's "we" is accurate and he is indeed a regular blue-collar guy, he is providing the Motte with useful information we wouldn't otherwise have access to.

Whenever we say "this thing is sacred, it shall not be traded for profane goods"

People who actually think sex has a sacred element don't just think it should not be traded for profane goods - they think it should not happen outside marriage at all (de jure) or with a narrow exception for relationships where the parties are ready, willing and able to be shotgun married (de facto).

Not really. "We" here is a reference to the kind of blue-collar worker @Goodguy was talking about (i.e. someone who puts a lot of their identity into being the kind of person who works hard in a physically demanding job), a demographic which is underrepresented here. If @hydroacetylene's "we" is accurate and he is indeed a regular blue-collar guy, he is providing the Motte with useful information we wouldn't otherwise have access to.

Ok, I missed that context.

To be clear, 'we' referred to more of a collective opinion of my coworkers/class peers/whatever.

Not really. "We" here is a reference to the kind of blue-collar worker @Goodguy was talking about (i.e. someone who puts a lot of their identity into being the kind of person who works hard in a physically demanding job), a demographic which is underrepresented here. If @hydroacetylene's "we" is accurate and he is indeed a regular blue-collar guy, he is providing the Motte with useful information we wouldn't otherwise have access to.

I mean, I think the objection holds because speaking for a hundred million people, of whom my learned friend @hydroacetylene is an atypical example, is pretty rich.

Fair, but I do think that I speak a tad bit better for the specific group of ‘normie red tribe blue collar maga’, which rarely sees prostitutes positively the way many people see athletes or rock stars, but also doesn’t hate them.

If he is a sufficiently atypical example that his views are not representative even when he thinks they are, that would be stolen valour (which while scurvy, is not moddable) rather than consensus-building.

I take @hydroacetylene's "we" seriously in the absence of evidence that he is not what he claims to be, and I would hope that my "we" is taken similarly seriously when I claim to speak on behalf of British liberals (in the British sense - the word has subtly different meanings in BrE and AmE). Given the unreliability of the MSM, the only ways the Motte gets to benefit from the perspectives of people who are not MAGA-supporting disgruntled grey tribers is to listen to the ones it has.

I don't think it's moddable, but I do think that mottizens should avoid using the "we" word, unless we're talking about weirdoes who frequent internet discussion boards.

FWIW I think the average normie laborer would find the idea of $10k/night hooker more intelligible than the idea of a $1000/hr lawyer or a $1,000,000,000 CEO or a $200k/yr HR director.

I see them that way -- theme parks are mostly ignorable entertainment, while sex carries narratives of shaming and dick-measuring. It's, in addition, monetizing loneliness. It would be one thing if 'sex work' was paying for disgusting fetishes or long hours or artificially prettying yourself up or sth like that, but it isn't, and I consider it contributes to below-replacement birthrates.

pseudo-intellectual

What's pseudo about it? She's genuinely an intellectual. In fact she bested Meghan Murphy in their debate over porn and sex work on Benjamin Boyce's podcast a few years ago. I remain more on Team Murphy, but she lost that battle.

Anyway, maybe it's just me being jaded and experienced, but I don't see the value in spending so much on these women. They're still just meat sacs after all, they don't warrant such money being spent on them. There's no way they are so differentiated from some other attractive, smart woman that they should command these prices. Do they come with some state-of-the-art virtual reality experience that enhances the encounter, Strange Days-style?

I'd like to see a profile on the guys paying for these women. That would be more illuminating. If they're twenty-something rich, nerdy Asian guys, that would track. If not, I'd have to revisit my murky thesis. These men might too be enchanted by the aesthetic of it all, just like some of the women who will see the article and especially the photo that comes with it. "I'm with this high-end escort like I'm in some Mission Impossible movie or something. It's a cool story I'm in. The people looking at me from across the hotel bar don't know she's an escort, anyway. They may think she's with me organically, and that we're a power couple out here slaying."

What's pseudo about it? She's genuinely an intellectual. In fact she bested Meghan Murphy in their debate over porn and sex work on Benjamin Boyce's podcast a few years ago.

That's probably one of the better examples of her being a pseudo-intellectual. "That's not a study, that's a TikTok poll" was a KO line that she never recovered from (though, I dunno, has she improved her methodology since?).

But Murphy came with no empirical evidence whatsoever. And there was more to the discussion than that.

Arguments don't have to be empirical. Also she never pretended to be doing empirical "studies", so pointing out the lack of evidence on her part is a smaller loss for her than it was for Aella. Finally, even if you're right, that does not make her not a pseudo-intellectual.

Murphy's "it just feels in my gut wrong" isn't going to cut it. It can supplement it though. And you say "pretended to be doing," but it's just weak empiricism, not a total absence. It's cursory and vaguely suggestive, which counts for something. Scattershot qualitative impressions are in a similar boat.

They're not quantitative, and, again, they're not pretending to be. What's more they don't have to be. Many people, including highly renowned rationalists, male their arguments off of incentive analysis, and priors, and that's pretty much what Meghan Murphy did, as far I rember.

And again, if she was as bad as you're saying, Aella defeating her would have no bearing on whether she's an actual intellectual, which is the position you have to defend.

Yeah but look at how awful the quality of work in social studies (especially anything sex-related) is.

Aella having an audience of people who are autistic enough to answer broadly-truthfully and being autistic enough to just present the info she gets instead of trying to massage it into a structure that suits whatever the agreed-upon orthodoxy of academic circles is is a level of truthiness I don't believe the current state of academic inquiry on this subject actually matches.

It's pretty strange to argue that Aella has a sample with a certain bias and then assume that all other research is deliberately "massaged" as opposed to them not having that particular problem.

(Not to mention that some research, e.g. evopsych-inspired research, is offensive to the orthodoxy as well yet still gets done)

I have negative faith in the ability of social studies to deliver anything that isn't what they've already decided amongst themselves is the appropriate conclusion. Evopsych a tad different since it's a harder science and even then there's a lot of 'our data might say X pretty clearly and we'll publish it but we'll try and say we concluded Y instead'

What's pseudo about it?

Agreed. Come on, we are supposed to be high-decouplers here. I can certainly hate everything Musk represents politically and still acknowledge that he had some amazing (if over-hyped) successes with SpaceX and Tesla.

I think it is safe to say that most sex workers are not intellectuals. But that is a correlation, not an invariant law of the universe.

I think the answer is that attractive, smart women who are plausibly these guy's class peers are very rarely willing to have sex for money.

Right. Having to pay for a simulacrum of a conversation they wish they were having with a badass power couple wifey just feels patronizing.

Yeah but they've got those desires and the market is unlikely to provide them with the biological female partner they'd like to find organically.

I'd be surprised if more than a dozen escorts in the Bay Area actually make more than $1M/year from escorting. It might even be substantially less. Their customers comprise a market that, though not exactly thin, is at least ragged enough and demanding enough that escorts can't simply line up a constant stream of guys to occupy all their working hours. And, if you treat $1M/year as an earnings cap for the very top performers in your career (that will last, very optimistically, a decade), in the Bay Area that isn't really shocking or impressive.

It's not even the best strategy if you're a woman looking to trade her looks and charm for money. Just marry a well-off guy, of which there are plenty. Or be like Lucy Guo: join a company early as the token pretty-ish woman, get fired, and walk away with billions.

Also, it seems like there's much better options for the guys? There was an article a while back about a somewhat autistic SF Tech guy that described his situation in which he basically had a subscription service with an Eastern European group that would send him an English speaking, very attractive, attentive Eastern European girlfriend of his type (given the pricing, probably Ukrainian) on a rotating basis every few months (I'm guessing on a tourist visa and they head back when the visa was running out) at an annual cost comparable to that 30k one weekend above. If you're into Asian woman you could prob. get even cheaper with Philippines/South East Asia or the like. This seems a lot more appealing to me if you're already going the escort route.

an English speaking, very attractive, attentive Eastern European girlfriend of his type

What's missing is the intellectual companionship, which is the selling point of the Aella sort to their particular clientele. The Eastern European woman might be attentive and attractive, and she might speak English, but she also is from a very different background and worldview, and possibly has a very different personality and level of intelligence.

Which is definitely strange to me -- surely there are enough decently-smart, decently-attractive, actually kind of geeky ladies for men with the kinds of money we're talking about to find one who might fall in love with him non-transactionally, but maybe the Bay really is a harsh place for straight love.

decently-smart, decently-attractive, actually kind of geeky ladies

I don't think there are, and this unfortunate fact has been one of the driving engines of the sex-relations theater of the culture war going all the way back to Elevatorgate. It drives the differences in how many women get into STEM, it drives the "I'm sorry, but I'm just flat-out exhausted by the constant string of even decent suitors thinking I'm their last romantic shot" that women in STEM/atheism/whatever have been writing about for 25 years, and generally it's pretty hard to find natal women who are into any given nerdy thing.

It drives the differences in how many women get into STEM, it drives the "I'm sorry, but I'm just flat-out exhausted by the constant string of even decent suitors thinking I'm their last romantic shot" that women in STEM/atheism/whatever have been writing about for 25 years, and generally it's pretty hard to find natal women who are into any given nerdy thing.

Hm, I guess this hasn’t been my experience. It’s true that you’ll find it hard to find a woman into, say, retro gaming, PC hardware, AI inference as a technology (rather than as a tool, which is controversial but not as much as the internet wants you to believe) or whatever particular nerdy thing you’re into, but from my zoomer perspective women who are geeky in general alongside a feminine disposition to geeky things aren’t rare. They’re often not the most beautiful women in the world, but male geeks are rarely the most handsome, and they’re good matches for each other.

My first girlfriend in school was very into Doctor Who (very “girl, but geeky” of her), I dated a girl in college who loved anime and went to conventions in cosplay (dressing up and being cute — very “girl, but geeky”), and my current girlfriend is a woman who works in biotech, is obsessed with molecular genetics and is learning Python for bioinformatics work (biology is peak “girl, but in stem”) who I met actually at an atheist club, if you can believe that. She also, of course, is fascinated by true crime (and reverences Othram’s genetic genealogy program), likes cute things, loves to call animals silly names, and reads dark academia novels.

I think geeky guys often make the mistake of looking for women who are essentially men — and yeah, there aren’t many of them. Men generally enjoy machines, systems, engineering, to a degree and in a way that women don’t, and likewise women generally enjoy creatures, cute things, fashion, social issues, learning about the dark side of the world, to a degree and in a way that men don’t. You’re unlikely to meet a woman whose personality and interests line up with men’s, or with yours.

So? You look for a woman who shares your disposition towards the world, your attitude towards the things you like even if applied to different interests, and that’s what geeky girls are like and have always been like. They’re not men with boobs, they’re women with geeky traits.

And a lot of things that are traditionally male-geek have surprising crossover: TikTok has found a way to market mechanical keyboards to white collar women, which is why my girlfriend now has two keyboards with “thocky” or “creamy” (gag) linear switches. And my girlfriend and I share an interest in history and church architecture, and relentless curiosity.

I had a coworker when I worked in PC repair who had an adorable girlfriend who played games on a PC he built for her. The dude was built like a blueberry, but he and his girl seemed to really love each other. What did she do? She was an English student aiming to become a teacher. Peak girl energy.

You don’t have to date in STEM to meet a woman that’s cute, affectionate, culturally compatible, and a good match. I like women whose hobbies and personalities are notably feminine; I like women, I want to be associated with a woman who is a woman and does woman things, but also shares my intellectualized, obsessive, fascinated posture towards the world. Such women are not so rare.

If SF makes finding such women particularly hard, my advice would be to build a nest egg and get the hell out of there. The kind of money we’re talking about counts as exquisite to most women of this country.

I think geeky guys often make the mistake of looking for women who are essentially men

I disagree. I think geeky guys would love women into geeky pursuits. From your own personal antecedents, all I can say is I wish I went to your high school, as growing up, I can count the number of women who were interested in such things on one hand with fingers left over.

In modern times, things are different, but I can't help but look at the cultural landscape and note that the reason a number of women are into such things nowadays is due to it being the 'popular thing'.

Women who are into weird and geeky hobbies are pretty thin on the ground, and can be difficult to find depending on your overall location.

I think geeky guys would love women into geeky pursuits.

But that's urquan's points; are these men looking for girls that are into the same things they are, or for girls that are into "geeky girl" pursuits?

I have been single for most of my adult life, I couldn't find many girls that were into the things I was in. The few dates I had where it clicked with the girls were into museums and arts, one of the girls I had a very enjoyable date with was a jazz musician. These are geeky things, those girls were geeks, but not "guys with boobs".

More recently, and after I found and married by wife, I ended up having to work, for a little while, for a company that did services for libraries (like categorizing, writing descriptions, and stuff like that). The whole place was filled top to bottom with mousey, shy librarian-type girls, some very good looking, that were for the most part a bit awkward interacting with a straight guy like me. That's when it really hit home; there are a ton of geeky girls, they just define geeky differently.

Perhaps I'm speaking from a personal bias, but when I think of 'geeky pursuits', I'm definitely including the woman who are passionate about obscure 1800s dress-making and skin/hair-care tips, for a low-hanging example.

I don't expect to ever find a woman to be interested in the same weird and whackass topics/hobbies I'm interested in, but I have no issues making room for someone in my life who's obsessed over obscure taxonomic apple varietals and goes out of her way to cultivate them, for example.

But, again. Women like that are pretty thin on the ground, from my experience. Then again, one could argue that people like that are pretty thin on the ground...

Edit: Come to think, going by the comment below me, I wonder if that company is hiring...

More comments

I've been lucky enough to stumble into a relationship with a nerdy girlfriend, but if I hadn't, I'd be asking if that company was hiring. I think you're right.

Especially when you're moving to the apex of geeky money-having dorks in SF and you're unlikely to get that much clout for being cashed up. Add in the fatwah upon workplace flirtation (which is probably where most guys are meeting their intellectual/interest matched woman if they missed the boat in university) and strong sex-segregated interests and what else can they do?

I think this is the exact opposite story that should be disseminated widely in a culture. We want stories of women foregoing money, status, and attention for the sake of a marital pairbond and having children, because that’s what you want high iq Bayarean women doing. This story is unlikely to nudge a reader toward escortdom, but it will nudge them toward valuing money and status even more. Or it will make some think, “if she’s taking advantage of her body for so much money, then it’s definitely okay if I do it on a smaller scale with my boss / manager / investor”. But it’s impossible to get a pro-motherhood + pro-love bio in a newspaper.

If you want that, I think you're in luck. I think that the majority of high IQ Bayarean women are either pursuing or at some point will be pursuing a pair bond, usually marital, that includes children. And I doubt that any amount of news stories would have a significant impact on the changing what fraction of them decides to turn to prostitution instead.

I don’t have an IQ breakdown, but they have the highest rate of delaying birth until their 40s, per LA Times

https://archive.is/LUoTe

When it comes to delaying motherhood to pursue careers and other life aspirations, Bay Area women are leading the nation. This region is home to the greatest share of women having children at 40 and older — a trend that experts chalk up to a combination of economic opportunity, progressive social norms and access to reproductive technology.

Dr. Mary Hinckley, IVF medical director at the Reproductive Science Center of the Bay Area, said she was not surprised to see the region leading the trend of older pregnancies since many women there prioritize careers and other life experiences ahead of starting a family. The Bay Area embraces modern forms of family structures that may or may not include children and, in general, largely does not foster a culture where women feel traditional societal pressures to start a family young, she said. Around half of her patients at the fertility clinic are at least 38 years old.

This is suboptimal for a variety of reasons. If we’re throwing a portion of our smartest and healthiest women there, we want them to have the lowest age of birth and the highest number of kids, to maximize health and intelligence of future generations.

Stories like this do have an effect, not any one story isolated, but the kind of women that are boosted in popularity and status among women through our cultural stories (news, social media).

It is suboptimal for society but probably optimal for a good amount of women. Let's say you have two life paths to choose from as a young, high-IQ, non-obese woman:

  1. Career focus with upper middle class luxuries and you can be in a dating paradise for 20-30 years where men jockey for your attention. Optionally pop out a geriatric pregnancy or two when you're around 40. Retire in reasonable comfort and wealth.

  2. Raise five kids as a tradwife and hope your husband doesn't leave you for a younger, prettier woman later on.

It's a no brainer when the risks and rewards are this unbalanced. High IQ women logically want a life of luxuries and comfort over the uncertain guarantees of raising a large family, outside of niche religious or cultural pressure to marry young and bear many children.

Aren't there a lot of high IQ women who married wealthy people and had lots of kids? Angelina Jolie had three kids (and adopted 3 more), Melinda Gates had three kids, MacKenzie Bezos (now Scott) had four...the scheme of getting society to idealize women like this has its problems, but I doubt it's due to a lack of examples.

And yes, these aren't great examples, but I suspect that's sampling bias due to notoriety; if you dig a bit you can find hundreds more women who were smart and talented, married smart and talented men, had 2 - 5 children, and didn't end up in front-page-divorce proceedings.

MacKenzie Bezos (now Scott) had four...the scheme of getting society to idealize women like this has its problems, but I doubt it's due to a lack of examples.

Yeah, but look at what happened there: she was with Jeff from the start, she stuck with him when he was just getting going, she gave him three sons (plus the adopted daughter) and managed the house and was the supportive executive wife and didn't get entangled in any scandals, and what was the end result? He cheats on her with a plastic surgery bunny that he then goes on to eventually marry, and while she got a nice slice of the pie in the divorce, I remember on here all the lamentations that she did nothing to deserve any of that.

Moral of story seems to be: don't bother doing the wifely bit, enhance your assets with surgery, find a rich sucker going through a midlife crisis, get him to dump the wife and kids, and reap the benefit of all that massive profitability without having to be there for the rough patches and backing him and his dreams.

Moral of story seems to be: don't bother doing the wifely bit, enhance your assets with surgery, find a rich sucker going through a midlife crisis, get him to dump the wife and kids, and reap the benefit of all that massive profitability without having to be there for the rough patches and backing him and his dreams.

This is a bad lesson to take, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are ruining their lives this way. This was basically the seething resentment at the heart of FemaleDatingStrategy. There's no point since men can cheat so let's be hyper-transactional and demanding upfront. There's no consideration they have the leverage to behave this way (or what they lose when they do)

First of all, the system worked: Mackenzie Scott supported her husband, made a family and when that family broke down for reasons not of her own choosing, the state rewarded her with her share of the community property. It's a better deal than many people get in breakups.

And if you don't break up (like Zuckerberg hasn't) then you just won.

Also: this is pretty arrogant. Who said you're beating the Lauren Sanchezes of the world in a head-to-head matchup if your man really wants a sycophant-sexpot? Charisma is a skill. You can watch some videos of a younger Sanchez and see that she's put her reps in in the gym and she has the right career to put her in contact with these men. Not everyone is so practiced, not everyone has a talent for ball and some people even find the whole thing unpalatable.

And she still got lucky.

That video being one of her glazing (as the kids say now) Bill Clinton is probably all we need to know about Ms. Sanchez and her map for making it through life 🤣

Most of the criticism I see of the former Mrs. Bezos is centered around her use of the money. It's not even that she isn't being economically productive with it, she's splurging enormous fortunes on actively anti-social leftist nonsense.

Yeah, there are high-IQ women still having above replacement amounts of children, but overall they do not seem to be having enough children to offset falling TFR overall. And they are possibly being outbred by low-IQ women, as IQ has been dropping since the 70's or 80's.

And they are possibly being outbred by low-IQ women

While the end-Baby-Boom-to-1990s fertility decline was dysgenic, the post-2010 decline in coupling and fertility is eugenic, in that the lower classes are being hit harder than the middle class and above. It is only dysgenic relative to the parts of sub-Saharan Africa where people still use flip phones.

If we cared more about IQ than TFR, we could levy a yearly tax on each living child. Would be pretty bad for our pension systems though.

I don’t quite disagree, but that’s why it’s important to promote the civilizational ideal of women through stories, including via news stories like the above. If you proclaim the superiority of women who give up creature comforts in favor of the creation of new life, then that provides social / emotional / spiritual comfort to these women, while restricting it from women who make incorrect life decisions (who don’t get these positive feelings). You are, in essence, increasing the rewards for the right decision. But the prostitute story increases the rewards for the wrong decision. It’s like, why did MacKenzie Scott donate 1 billion dollars to HBCUs? The news taught her that this was socially valuable; it enhanced her honor, status, sense of worth, and thus her comfort with herself. It absolved her from the fear and the shame of not doing what she’s supposed to be doing, which is a common feeling among humans and which we can guide through stories. America’s hyper-striving Bayareans feel guilty or ashamed that they’ve never completed a marathon or sold a startup or gotten into some party, but you can literally just rewire them into feeling this way about prosocial and pro-civilizational things if you own their news and algorithms.

Yeah, the stories matter, I agree on that. Unfortunately in an age of Youtube and Instagram, anybody can write a story and have it reach a large audience. We can no longer restrict media story content like how news outlets hid FDR's polio from the public. We can restrict technology and outside content like the Amish, but I don't think thats a reasonable solution.

It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.

So close. You are questioning if the escorts who earn big bucks really are worth their money, but don't stop to think if the same might be true for the tech bros who are paying the escorts.

If hiring expensive escorts is conspicuous consumption, then so is hiring expensive tech bros. Plenty of companies decide that paying their CEOs with stock options to the tune of 100M$ is worth the money -- likely for status reasons, some species of white elephants, then so is the CEO paying top tier escorts for a weekend. After all, what use is a astronomical salary if you do not spend it? Many guys end up spending a decent fraction of their paycheck on romance. Paying your ex-wife half of what you own -- or paying child support, for that matter -- generally ends up being more expensive than paying an escort, I think.

A lot of the goods of conspicuous consumption run into totally diminishing returns, where every doubling of the price gets you less value. Going from a 15k$ car to a 30k$ car will be a whole different experience. Going from a car worth one million to one worth two is probably not even going to be noticeable. Likewise, there is a difference between a four dollar wine and a two dollar wine, but if you spend 200k$ rather than 100k$ on a bottle you are most likely just enjoying the price tag. Likewise, I would likely not to be able to tell the difference between an evening with a 10k$ escort and a 100k$ escort (note to self: think about putting that experiment on gofundme). Both will be hot, cultivated and great at sex, I imagine. The differences will probably be completely beyond me, like "but the more expensive one is more focused on the philosophy of utilitarianism, while the cheaper escort is more into continental philosophy, which is less in demand by rich johns right now".

Going from a 15k$ car to a 30k$ car will be a whole different experience.

Given that the only way you're getting a 15K car in 2026 is by buying a used one, yes, I imagine it would be a whole difference experience.

IMO I think the car market basically peaks at Teslas price point now. Anything else feels like a downgrade to me unless you’re on a track. A Ferrari is just a worse car than a Tesla on public roads. Also true of the entire watch market versus an Apple Watch.

but the more expensive one is more focused on the philosophy of utilitarianism, while the cheaper escort is more into continental philosophy, which is less in demand by rich johns right now

"How long can a girl be expected to sit around workin' on fifth-dimensional semi-fractals without takin' a break?"

I suppose this cements “the grass is always greener…” as the world’s oldest fallacy.

Measuring one’s life against the most lurid possible comparison is a proud tradition. The difference between your reaction and a kid wanting to be a big rock star is that you don’t actually like the prospect of being in that position. Probably. I’m not gonna judge.

as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand

Note that these are VERY different options. Unlike prostitution, you could almost certainly work your way into any one of them depending on your risk tolerance. But, like, why should you? Is the expected value of any of those options actually higher? Does it outweigh the added risk?

Point is, that tweet is engagement bait. I can’t endorse forming economic opinions based on a platform that hates you rewards style over substance. Twitter delenda est.

My point is I am tempted do something low trust that makes me a lot of money instead of work a normal job. Trade off for myself at the expense of the commons. I’m not comparing these jobs to prostitution necessarily. Only in that they’re all antisocial to some degree.

I guess I’m not convinced of the throughline between all four options, there.

“Leeching off the government” is the only one which involves claiming benefits that were intended for someone else. Some NGOs fall in this category. Everything else sounds like a central example of a job: someone paying you for your labor. If you’re honest and they’re satisfied with your work, how are you defecting?

I consider sex work to be fundamentally anti social and defecting, we probably disagree.

How so?

Like, I completely understand finding it unappealing, even immoral. I don’t think that makes it defection. What’s the common good which is getting captured in this case?

I agree that it is defecting from the sustainable family ideal in that it cheapens or tarnishes the value of sex provided by family oriented mothers. However, there is nothing to be done about it. There will always be a man with resources willing to trade his excess resources for sex from a woman. It has been, and always will be. I view polygamous marriages, serial monogamy, and concubines as extensions of defecting.

There is plenty to be done about it. The ideal scenario would involve prestigious magazines not writing glowing hagiographies about whores, for a modest start.

It would help, but I think it's mostly wasted effort. One less story, against the weight of Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and all other addictive social media glorifying prostitution. Even President Trump is a poor role model in this aspect, as a serial monogamist twice divorced, saying "grab 'em by the pussy". If we cannot expect good stories from a top male role model, there's little point in worrying about some magazines.

I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

This sentiment is the spirit of our age. And it is a powerful one. Powerful enough to be dangerous.

One looks around themselves only to see ruins. The ruins of institutions, morality, competence, dignity. Lorded over by intrigue and profiteering.

But the despair of ruins, as all things, contains its own contradiction. A hope stirs in men so beset. A miraculous hope. Hope to escape from a mortifying impotence.

And for whom hope? For men with simple ideas and strong resolve.

Yes, the spirit of our age is the spirit of the dictator. The budding flower of the strongman is always nascent in the garden of the brothel.

O, destined Cromwell, may your retribution be no orgy of blood, for all whores who know they own the day also know that tomorrow belongs to you.

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

I imagine this sort of life would become markedly less cute in your old age compared to being a wageslave and taking the contribution match for a couple of decades.

If you're a reasonable saver and SEA-max there's pretty good options, especially if you can get a Western pension which goes remarkably further overseas. I'd also be skeptical as a current young person that the current retirement meta is still in place in our dotages

It's a mistake to take fee lists like that at face value. This is a market where, due to its questionable legality, it's pretty hard to do price discovery. Clients aren't revealing how much they actually pay, and service providers have an incentive to signal that they are in-demand and high-value, because that's how they attract high-end clients. The whole thing is opaque and vibes-based.

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

I have known one of the women this article is describing. (I don't know if she's actually named in the article, I couldn't get past the paywall at my office. But she's aella's set, so the exact sort being described.)

You do not want the lives of these women. In one sense it's sexy to be a porn star or an escort, especially today when people pay you lots of money, you go to parties all over the world, the food is nice and the views are beautiful, etc. But it's not really worth it. As someone who's been blessed to travel a lot after enough of it the locations all blur together and the food is overrated anyways. (Nobody cooks as well as my mother, or my aunts for that matter. My father grilled a better steak than any I've ever had out.) What you're left with at the end of the day is yourself. Wherever you blow, there you are.

The woman I'm thinking of had a lot of problems. She had unnecessary plastic surgery and nose jobs to make herself more beautiful, when she was quite beautiful already. She fucked men for favors and started fights and then found herself without friends. She felt powerful being taken out by powerful and wealthy men who strung her along with fantasies of marriage or introductions that never came. And she didn't need the money because she came from money already. The people who knew her best talked of overwhelming loneliness. Whoever you know, there they are.

If you met her you would think she was beautiful and smart and funny and kind. Maybe this is cope, maybe it's straightforwardly good to be beautiful and wear beautiful clothes and eat beautiful things. Maybe I didn't really know her in any meaningful sense and it's rude to even profile her in the third person. I think she had a lot of fun having sex. I think she did a lot of nice things for a friend one time at some social expense to her own reputation.

I think she hated me because I was gay. I think she was the type of woman who loves exercising power over men, and there was nothing she could exercise over me. I think I saw a glimpse of something that made me feel profoundly sad. I think she would say that she doesn't think about me at all.

I think it all ended rather badly for everyone involved.

I've known lots of other successful and interesting people and I would say generally that the ones who are happiest are extremely productive or extremely devoted to their families.

Thinking some more, I've known some guys who do OnlyFans. One of them is a real sweetheart, pure soul, I have nothing bad to say about him. I think, though, if you wanted to fantasize about the life, at least with respect to professional sex, you would have to really, really enjoy having lots of sex with strangers.

Maybe we're underestimating how sexy sex work has yet to get. Maybe AI and social media have only just begun. Maybe it's like bitcoin when it was $100, and you think, this thing has peaked, we missed our chance, it's too late to buy in. And it still had a few orders of magnitude to go. Sex is after all the oldest profession. Porn stars are famous now, they have a lot of status, it might probably become even more popular. Laid-off email job guys are going to have more time to jerk off right? But I can't think of anybody who got into porn and aged out and is enthusiastically promoting how good it was and how they have no regrets about anything they did. Mostly the opposite.

I think that for the journalists in question it's self-evident that this isn't a great path to pursue. It's also self-evident that there's a certain class of people who will be willing to do sex work regardless of the social stigma, and if there's some poor sap willing to pay them thousands of dollars, well, good for them I guess. I'm reminded of a conversation I had over a decade ago with a college girl who worked for me while I was with the Boy Scouts. A couple years later she was still in college and still working summers while I had left but come back for a week to help with training. I was on a canoe trip with just her and who would have been her boss. Someone had told me a couple weeks prior that she was dancing at a local strip club that the more senior staff had visited together a time or two in prior years, and we were discussing trying to go there while she was working just to see how she'd react. It never ended up happening, but on this trip she confirmed that she was working there, though our plan wouldn't have worked because she only worked afternoons.

Anyway, she said that the woman who handled the strippers or whatever told her how she could make even more money, because of course she could. The going rate was less than my salary at the time, but a lot for a broke college student, especially considering that it wasn't a 9 to 5. I told her that if you wanted to be a prostitute you couldn't be too selective about whom you slept with, since she seemed to be under the delusion that her clientele would be the same 30s office workers who stopped by the club after work. I asked her if she'd be willing to sleep with the big boss at the time, who looked like a younger, thinner version of Dr. Phil, and she was appalled at the idea. She told me that she was assured that they wouldn't pressure her into anything she was uncomfortable with, etc., etc., but I tried to explain to her that while that may be true, the ones who were overly selective weren't the ones who made the kind of money she was quoting. I have no idea who she ended up sleeping with or how much money she actually made, just that she was eventually canned from the Boy Scouts after she requested time off to work her "other job" and what must have been the worst kept secret was made abundantly clear to management. Needless to say, I didn't expect to spend that day trying to talk someone out of becoming a prostitute.

That being said, I think that the same thing applies to all of these "professions" that promise a lot of money for what looks like not a lot of work, or at least the kind of work one thinks they'd find fun. A friend on mine who teaches high school in a rural area says half the kids think they have a future as influencers and YouTubers. I'd be surprised if a single student she teaches over the course of her career is able to do it for a living, even for a brief period. Most of the people who blew up on YouTube started making videos for their own personal edification without any intention of quitting their day jobs.

Wherever you blow, there you are.

Nominating for AAQC solely on the strength of this line.

Reminds me of The Sun Also Rises.

“Hello, Robert,” I said. “Did you come in to cheer me up?”

“Would you like to go to South America, Jake?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I never wanted to go. Too expensive. You can see all the South Americans you want in Paris anyway.”

“They’re not the real South Americans.”

“They look awfully real to me.”

I had a boat train to catch with a week’s mail stories, and only half of them written.

“Do you know any dirt?” I asked.

“No.”

“None of your exalted connections getting divorces?”

“No; listen, Jake. If I handled both our expenses, would you go to South America with me?”

“Why me?”

“You can talk Spanish. And it would be more fun with two of us.”

“No,” I said, “I like this town and I go to Spain in the summer-time.”

“All my life I’ve wanted to go on a trip like that,” Cohn said. He sat down. “I’ll be too old before I can ever do it.”

“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “You can go anywhere you want. You’ve got plenty of money.”

“I know. But I can’t get started.”

“Cheer up,” I said. “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”

But I felt sorry for him. He had it badly.

“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”

“I’m not interested in bull-fighters. That’s an abnormal life. I want to go back in the country in South America. We could have a great trip.”

“Did you ever think about going to British East Africa to shoot?”

“No, I wouldn’t like that.”

“I’d go there with you.”

“No; that doesn’t interest me.”

“That’s because you never read a book about it. Go on and read a book all full of love affairs with the beautiful shiny black princesses.”

“I want to go to South America.”

He had a hard, Jewish, stubborn streak.

“Come on down-stairs and have a drink.”

“Aren’t you working?”

“No,” I said. We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: “Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables,” and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working. Anyway, we went down-stairs to the bar and had a whiskey and soda. Cohn looked at the bottles in bins around the wall. “This is a good place,” he said.

“There’s a lot of liquor,” I agreed.

“Listen, Jake,” he leaned forward on the bar. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”

“Yes, every once in a while.”

“Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?”

“What the hell, Robert,” I said. “What the hell.”

“I’m serious.”

“It’s one thing I don’t worry about,” I said.

“You ought to.”

“I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or other. I’m through worrying.”

“Well, I want to go to South America.”

“Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”

Thinking some more, I've known some guys who do OnlyFans. One of them is a real sweetheart, pure soul, I have nothing bad to say about him. I think, though, if you wanted to fantasize about the life, at least with respect to professional sex, you would have to really, really enjoy having lots of sex with strangers.

Wait I always thought most OF models were making videos with their boyfriends. Now you're telling me they're just actors?

I always thought it would be fun to make videos in the former scenario, but certainly not the latter.

I'm reading your post as half tongue-in-cheek but I want to reply at length anyways (although perhaps this is all obvious):

I would say the most common and successful genre is OnlyFans "performers" who "collaborate" with other performers. It's a big world out there and people will pay for a lot of things and you can make it doing solo "content" or "chat". But even a lot of that is buttressed on an ecosystem of OnlyFans performers collaborating with other performers.

Basically it works like this: OnlyFans stars are all messaging each other or networking in groupchats to figure out who they're going to fuck next. There's a lot of gossip about who's good to work with and lots of rumors about bad experiences with particular stars. Most of this content is amateur, by which I mean, it's not produced by big porn studios. A lot of OnlyFans content now does rely on hiring professional cameramen who film the content to look as if it were amateur. Lots of it is still done with just "ring lights" and some strategically-placed phones on record. Big porn studios have moved upmarket into really emphasizing higher-quality cameras and photography, logistics, and elaborate scenes. A lot of performers will also do a mix of OnlyFans and studio porn, depending on what their mood is.

There are a lot of advantages to constantly "collaborating" with other performers:

  • Every performer you work with potentially brings in a new audience.
  • Audiences get tired of watching the same sex scenes between the same performers.
  • New "collaborations" offer performers the opportunity to show off "different skills"
  • Well-established performers have networks of referrals and advertisers that are attractive to new performers
  • OnlyFans stars enjoy having sex with strangers and traveling to have sex with strangers

My friend, for example: His largest audience comes from Instagram, where he creates fairly tame videos / reels meant to advertise himself to a general audience. (Maybe he does a quick video of himself telling a story about something that happened to him today in his car, maybe he does a clip with a flirty caption where his ass looks good as he does pull-over rows at the gym.) You click through to his twitter, and he obviously has an OnlyFans, although he mostly hints at the truly hardcore stuff and you have to pay to see it. (Lots of performers post sex clips right there out in full, some approaching such length you wonder why anyone would bother to pay for the full version at all.) My friend has told me he's very cynical about how he produces content: he aims to film one new "collaboration" a month, and he spins a few clips from one video into enough advertisements to make enough tweets about it for a full month. He tells me that the kind of men he has sex with on camera aren't really the kinds of men he likes to have sex with off camera, although it looks to me like he has a good time. His fiance is pilled on all of this and doesn't seem to mind. My friend, in fact, rarely mentions his fiance at all, to the point that unless you very devotedly followed his content you would probably assume he were single and maybe even dating around.

I'll add for color a few details that are particular to gay world.

In gay world, everybody knows who the big porn stars are. They are minor celebrities. Some are celebrities. If you go to enough gay clubs in big cities you'll run into them. Everybody knows who they are. They are not really excluded in any social scenes, usually quite the opposite. Imagine if you went to a friend's large 100+ birthday party and Bonnie Blue was there. You go out to your local bar and Mia Khalifa is there. You go dancing and there's Elon Musk cavorting with Aella. What I mean is that there is no separation where porn is relegated to a seedier subworld you have to seek out to access. It is simply the default. If I went clubbing with my friend, people would recognize him.

Which is to say, if you're fantasizing about this life at all, you have to really enjoy sex with strangers. And with any success with becoming a celebrity. With very few exceptions. I have yet to hear someone recommend it whole-heartedly at all. Mostly, the ones who come to like it come to feel as though they've learned something about human nature the rest of us can't know. It's actually ironically very similar to the attitude I pick up from DC politicos who think they "know how the sausage is 'really' made". They think they have special access to some knowledge about the human condition. And it makes them a little jaded in all ways.

I'll add, as a final thought, pardon me if this is Too Much Information, that sex with porn stars is not something I would recommend either. It's very mechanical and lifeless. And in person many of them look way more fake blond and spray-on suntanned and gussied up than you would think from the pictures. The act itself is very mechanical. I've had this argument with some friends before, and some of them have told me I'm crazy. But for anyone here who feels like they're missing out I would say in strong terms that, from what I've experienced, you're not really missing out on anything you should feel jealous about. Unless you really, really like having lots of sex with strangers.

that sex with porn stars is not something I would recommend either. It's very mechanical and lifeless.

I'm guessing this is a quirk of the (male) gay sex world.

While a talented and enthusiastic amateur is probably the best situation, women in sex work are going to be better able to pretend to enthusiasm and significantly more likely to have actual talent than a lot of women.

Many straight men and women match up without sleeping around much and gaining skills isn't really considered mandatory for women, add on the classic wife/husband drive mismatch and many men would find an improvement in a professional.

Especially if you believe the attractive women are bad in bad thing.

I may have severely misunderstood your original post. When you said guys who do OF, I thought you meant the guys who are featured in videos with female OF artists. Those are just boyfriends and husbands, right?

No it’s the same logic. I think straight OF stars have more of the boyfriend-girlfriend porn but the stablehorse “fresh meat” sex with strangers logic still applies.

I think the collaboration stuff still goes on to a certain degree. Johnny Sins has an OF and seems to couple with other members of the OF-sphere for instance. The boyfriend/husband thing probably the most easy place to start with for OF girls but I'd imagine as you scale up you'd probably be better off presenting free agency to your subscribers plus gotta have a partner who's built for porn and wants to do all the shoots

How do you feel about professional wrestling?

I don’t have stats on the OF talent base, other than knowing it has pretty extreme earnings disparities. It is possible that the bulk of content is small-scale amateur film by couples even while the bulk of the cash goes to a smaller pool of celebrities. Can’t say I find it likely compared to the alternative where almost everyone is shooting solo videos.

My hot take is that these sorts of stories reflect more on the ethics of journalists than escorts or the nerds using them. You've already gotten a variety of comments saying "duh." What irritates me about these sorts of stories is that (as @ToaKraka points out) this is an extremely unrepresentative sample of escorts. But there are a number of people who read things like this and think "well for that price I'd do that" and the most likely outcome is that they do that and don't make that price.

Traditional morality was much better at not talking about things than it was stopping things from happening but I think at the end of the day that extra layer of friction - refusing to discuss such things in polite society, highlighting the downsides through didactic tales - serves a function, not in absolutely preventing vice, but in stopping people who might be enticed into thinking (incorrectly! at least statistically speaking) that such a path is a get-rich-quick scheme with few downsides.

There are, however, downsides to this approach, including making it easier to conceal misconduct, so I am not necessarily calling for a RETVRN here. And no, this is not a "we should get rid of the freedom of speech" comment, but there are certain ethical consequences to failing to properly contextualize things and the world is a better place when people try to do that. (One of the upsides of The Motte!)

“Actually, it’s about ethics in e-thot journalism”

The culture war really has come full circle, hasn’t it?

(I kid. Mostly.)

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country

So why don't you leave? This probably sounds harsher then I mean it too. But I did. Life outside the US can be pretty good you are right. So why not go to a first world country like Singapore that's business friendly, or some cheaper country, you could choose a place like Georgia where most people are Orthodox ot as you say Thailand. Those doing NGO grifts probably make less than you so it'd be a downgrade materially and morally. But leaving? You should seriously consider it the rest of the world is fine for an American willing to work with it. Jump on in the water is fine.

Well, a lot of it is that I have close family and friends here that I care about. I live an hour from where I grew up and I am the type of person who cares about roots and really knowing a place.

As I said it gets more attractive, but ultimately my relationships with other human beings are the most valuable and irreplaceable thing in my life, so that weights quite heavily in favor of staying put.

No harm perhaps in taking up travel outside the US a little more if that’s the case. It doesn’t make sense to me to think about moving to another country until you first ask yourself what it is you’re looking for. Take a bit from the page of Nomad Capitalist (guy always struck somewhat as a conman by his personality, but a lot of his content is solid and informative).

Nomad Cap is better than the majority of stuff in that market but his fees are kinda ridiculous unless you're comfy 8 figures and totally adverse to experimentation.

This would be difficult to achieve with a hybrid job that requires me to be in office multiple days a week. If I were full remote I’d consider it.

That’s my primary stumbling block as well. I doubt I’d ever leave the US but I’ve thought about it at times. I’m in the same boat as a lot of other people; it’s mostly extended family and friends keeping me here. Something of a new publishing pipeline has opened up the last few years detailing remote careers geared toward travelers and expats. It originally emerged after COVID and has somewhat had a bit of a small takeoff. Consider checking it out on Amazon.

K-Shaped economy plus I'm surprised a lot of the twitter takes are of the 'these guys could get a 11/10 Russian who could suck a golf ball through a straw for cheaper' thing. Maybe I'm overly stereotyping but I'd imagine there's a lot of nerdy types who've been massive beneficiaries of tech money who'd prefer a 7.5/10 who can converse enthusiastically about rationalist stuff over Svetlana.

Hell, I'm not into escorts (I don't mind the act of selling sex I just find that I am totally turned off by the act of buying it) and I'd probably prefer the Aella escort experience to the Svetlana escort experience and those numbers are largely a rounding number at that end of the economy. Also signalling and weird findom/whale-flexing things with substantial rebates or negotiated lower prices are rife in these kinda things. Sophie Rain's purported numbers are baffling to me but the only real possible explanation I can think of would be some sort of whale flexoff.

I'm not an enjoyer of these services either, but I imagine I'd be completely opposite of you. I can already talk about nerdy stuff I'm into with friends or on the internet, I don't have to talk about it with a woman I'm paying money to slobber on my balls. Would I prefer her to be smarter than a balloon just so that she can make an experience more smooth and enjoyable? Yes, but at the end of the day her main task is not that.

I imagine if you're a 7-8 figure SF tech guy, either a founder or a D+ level at a big well known tech company, you would definitely prefer paying more to a reputable escort that won't take sneak pics of you or brag to her friends about who she fucked yesterday though.

One thing I’ve learned through history has been just how much sexual attitudes have been culturally conditioned. Napoleon made an observation once (I know I’m butchering it to some degree) about just how much beauty or sexual attraction is environmentally derived. I thought it was a foolish notion at the time but maybe he was onto something. In medieval Scandinavia, it wasn’t uncommon for a group of people to actively observe a newlywed couple having sex in the bridal chamber, right at their damn bedside, on the night of. Loose sexual mores among the women also weren’t considered shameful provided it was kept within the same genetic community and they weren’t racially exogamous. Homosexual butt sex was every bit as disgusting then as it is now. It wasn’t until Christianity spread through the region that modern notions of “privacy” became a thing to the region.

Oh, do I have opinions on this, particularly after reading Against Neaera 😁 Now, this was politically motivated against the man in the case, but the attack on the woman's character is very enlightening about the attitudes towards prositution.

Naera is presented as this vile, immoral woman (and by association her daughter), but reading it, you get a different picture. She was a slave, owned by someone who groomed her from childhood to this profession, turned out when she hit puberty, with no ability of her own to refuse clients or have any say in who she would have sex with. She got passed around, sold on, was even divided between two men who, when it was time for them to marry, wanted to get shot of her so told her to get out of the city but they would graciously allow her to buy her freedom from them.

Her daughter is married off to a miser (if you read between the lines) who sends her back home after a year of marriage, while she's pregnant, and keeps the dowry/bride price (there's a court case over this between him and the father). The pretext is that she is the child of an alien woman, and hence not an Athenian (since Athenians could not legally marry foreigners) and so he cannot legally marry her and any child of hers will not be an Athenian citizen.

There is no similar outrage about the men who patronise courtesans/prostitutes. Only whores go drinking and dining at banquets openly with men, but the men can drink and be entertained and have sex and nobody blinks an eye. The men can buy slaves for the sole purpose of sex. The men can have sex with slaves who are pimped out until they get too old and are then sold on. Nothing wrong there, the men can participate in civic life to the full without moral opprobrium.

This two-sided cultural conditioning around sexual attitudes is why you won't get rid of prostitution, not even by condemning the women who trade in it. Selling sex is shameful but buying sex is fine, so there will always be a market.

Sure and prostitution used to be a lot more mainstream and casual in the West. Still is in some cultures like Japan

It wasn’t until Christianity spread through the region that modern notions of “privacy” became a thing to the region.

I'd quibble that a lot of these norms remained even after Christianity entered the space, and even after it popularized among the common man. The mainstream academia overstates the 'invention of privacy' as a thing, but various levels of invasive 'bedding ceremony' or tolerated prostitution remained in a lot of Christianized spaces up until the 1600s. Increasing quality of life making modern privacy possible rather than consisting of stolen moments seems to have had some impact.

((I'm not sure on anal sex. It seems like it should have had massive problems, since between the lack of antibiotics and the cost of oils it gets unpleasant fast, but there's a lot of records that seem to heavily treat a lot of nonreproductive sex in the same category, and handjobs and blowjobs get really outsized focus even as they may have been less prone to UTIs than PIV.))

”In medieval Scandinavia, it wasn’t uncommon for a group of people to actively observe a newlywed couple having sex in the bridal chamber”

This makes a surprising amount of sense when you think about it. At its core, what a marriage is is a public announcement that these two specific people are having sex, and that the community is okay with it. There is no better representation of these values than for the community to literally watch the consummation of the marriage.

I understand the logic fully. My comment was more to the point about how Napoleon’s observation now seems startlingly correct, because my instincts revolt against that kind of sexual norm as a Catholic (that’s a cultural difference, which is to his point). The reason they often did that back then was because it constituted “proof,” as a way to cement relations between family clans and noble estates. It wasn’t just a tool of the societal elite though, it was more common than originally believed, but most documented cases focused on the upper crust of society. Often times they’d also station someone outside the room for the morning after, so when the clothing and linen was all collected, there were bloodstains of proof that the woman was a virgin when it happened. Nowadays though if someone propositioned me with something like that I’d tell them hell no.

The medieval catholic church allowed sex in front of witnesses as a proof of consummation in annulment trials.

We're actually getting hetaerae!

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

Everyone else seems to be pushing back with varying amounts of sarcasm and vitriol, so I want to chime in and say that I actually really feel you man. It is disheartening and demoralizing to be young working-age man in a feminized and rapidly aging society, where the only subject that appears to be up for debate is if our daily sacrifice-quota to the Boomer-Emperor on his Golden Stool should be 1,000 or 1,100 Psykers. My protestant work ethic was once strong, but lately when I look around me that motivation to doggedly pursue duty has diminished. Why do we work? The fortune you need to catch even a semi-pretty girlfriend today (which is one of the main benefits of such fortune, as it ever was) is vast indeed if you aren't a natural with the ladies, and the money one does earn is increasingly siphoned to sustain pensions and elderly care in the World's least subtle Ponzi scheme. And many times that care goes to those so marred by sickness that it is doubtful if their lives is of benefit to anyone, least of all themselves.

And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. (Revelations 9:6)

I don't believe in surrendering to sadness, but it's a sign of health to be distraught about a future where a small number of capital-owners live like kings while the rest of us are relegated to the saddest jobs in existence. I would in my heart think less of any young man who felt otherwise.

I don't believe in surrendering to sadness, but it's a sign of health to be distraught about a future where a small number of capital-owners live like kings while the rest of us are relegated to the saddest jobs in existence

There is still time to get on the train? I'm not the most well-off guy in the world. But I have my AI stocks, if 'capital' means anything in the future I should be fine. People are still talking about the AI bubble and such. Lots of people are investing in property or value stocks. The singularity is not priced in.

Alternately if we get a 'fuck the shareholders, liquidate everyone who doesn't have a killbot swarm' scenario then you and I won't need to worry about doing sad jobs.

I sometimes feel the same way until I look at it from the other side. If I had no dignity and was completely willing to sell out any self-respectability I had, I could accomplish the same end. I truly don’t envy the lives these people lead. They’re hollow on the inside and can only live a psychologically comfortable life, living in the most supreme level of ignorance one can possibly imagine. Never believe these people when they put so much energy and emotion into telling you how happy they are. They aren’t trying to convince you, they’re trying to convince themselves. True happiness isn’t performative, it’s quiet and content.

I’ve also had the same opportunity to make much more money than I currently do but one thing I always come back to is “what am I doing this for?” I don’t need that much money, and I don’t have a family of my own to support. I was never one of those guys who if I had a billion dollars I’d be living the high life, chartering private jets to Dubai and dropping hundreds of thousands on gold chains. Even at my greediest I’d just be doing more of the same. Ordinary people don’t really envy the rich, they envy the lives they ‘think’ rich people live.

I made my money in a very negative-sum, anti-social space and am now fortunately enough to be largely post-work but yeah I echo this. So much siphoning, so many of the tasks that are offered have no particular direct association with the creation of value and are poised to optimize meh processes. Not to echo the Margin Call sentiment, but few jobs are fortunate enough to actually be involved with the building of bridges these days.

What space? And do you have plans to try and fix things in society as a recompense for the harm you caused? Just curious, trying not to judge.

I appreciate it. I am a bit surprised at the amount of vitriol and "duh you idiot" I am getting in the replies, but it is what it is.

I agree that surrendering to sadness and despair isn't the way. Despite my frustrations above I've found a lot of meaning and goodness in life outside of work. I do a job that I don't hate, that doesn't destroy me with stress, and focus on other areas of my life.

What exactly is new here? "High class escorts" have existed for many years (see Pretty Woman in 1990). The incredible earning power of female sexuality has been known for not quite as long but a very long time. OnlyFans blew up more than 5 years ago, and the top OF models make far more than the earnings quoted. Even if we're talking only the sale of intimacy, I'm pretty sure pornstars have been selling themselves for very high fees online for quite a while. Or see the numerous stories about Instagram models going to the Middle East for some "Dubai Chocolate". As another poster mentioned, the media has a peculiar fascination with the sex lives of Silicon Valley, but that's the only unique thing about this.

1990? I was going to mention Mme de Pompadour and du Barry. In their milieu, many pretty women were given education in arts, conversation and refined taste to hold salon with the chief career prospect of marrying well and/or becoming a mistress to far richer man than they'd hope to marry, such as King of France, and live in opulence. (One of revolutions of the French revolution was that Joséphine de Beauharnais become an Empress, not a royal mistress.) One famous necklace of the Diamond Necklace Affair was worth of 2 million livres, dunno, several tens of thousands times of skilled artisan s yearly income. And it was only a single item part of such lifestyle.

Generation of queen Victoria and Albert made such affairs less visible and uncouth for members of royalty in anglophone and protestant countries, but it was a conscious reaction to rise of middle class and middle class values. Courtesans never disappeared with Victorians, though, just become more drowned-upon. And I don't think it is surprising that they eventually return prominently into the public sphere with the disappearance of middle class and Victorian middle class values.

Waaaaait a minute...isn't this just courtesans all over again?

I wonder if it occurred to anyone to simply import unemployed or underemployed geishas into San Francisco.

When people call it the oldest profession in the world, this is actually what they mean.

I’m pretty sure that covers “camp follower” too, mind you.

Apparently women selling themselves for lifelong indenture to a man and in return sharing in all he has is totally fine, but the instant a woman sells herself for only a fraction of her life and in return shares in a fraction of a man's wealth...

Timeshares?

Are we not more than the mere sum of our economic relationships?

If you can afford to be.

Fairly certain Aella’s crew of whores have implied that they are looking for marriage. The whoring is just skipping the dating part of skipping to the sex. Which is many ways is rational since both sides want that. And then maybe you fall in love with her skills.

Aella though lack of showering and saying she still wants to get gang-banged a few times a year might put marriage out of reach.

But that's what's so strange about this story. These are mistress prices, not escort prices. It's all the expenses of maintaining a mistress without any of the exclusivity or veneer of respectability. What exactly are these men actually paying for?

It's like paying $500,000 for a year-long lease on a car that only costs $300,000 to buy. Just, why?

I'm not able to access the article, but they may indeed be selling temporary fidelity; the grandes horizontales would take a lover for a while and then move on when he or they tired of the association. Plus there's probably an element of showing off on the male side here, the extravagance of "yes I'm paying for this woman at the kind of rates you all know are nosebleed high", since extravagance showered on one's mistress was another way of demonstrating wealth, status and power: you can afford to throw away this kind of money on this kind of expenditure.

Just be glad you don't have a mistress or kept woman like this!

La Païva, as Lachmann became known after her second marriage, crossed paths in 1852 with the 22-year-old Prussian industrialist and mining magnate Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck. ...The young Reichsgraf was smitten, and upon meeting her again in Berlin, he offered to make La Païva his mistress and declared that, if she agreed, she would share his fortune. La Païva, who craved riches more than anything, was reported to have said, after settling down with the count, "All my wishes have come to heel, like tame dogs!"

On 16 August 1871, La Païva obtained an annulment of her marriage to Albino Francisco de Araújo de Païva, and two months later, on 28 October, Thérèse Lachmann (the name she used on the marriage certificate) wed Henckel von Donnersmarck in the Lutheran Church in Paris. The groom's gift to the bride was a triple-strand diamond necklace formerly owned by the deposed French empress Eugénie.

...In addition to purchasing Château de Pontchartrain, near Paris, for La Païva and giving her an annuity of £80,000, Henckel von Donnersmarck financed the construction of the most ostentatious mansion in Paris: Hôtel de la Païva, located at 25 avenue des Champs-Élysées. ...Among the mansion's celebrated features is a central staircase made of Algerian yellow onyx (far more expensive than marble), which matched the Donnersmarck yellow diamonds, and a tub of the same North African stone; another tub, made of silver, had three taps, one being for either milk or Champagne.

My uneducated guess is that there is a crucial difference here.

Prostitutes usually harbor the fantasy of finding a man with a heart of gold who marries them and thus saves them from their lousy fate, because they know that otherwise they will age out of their profession quickly. Mistresses and high-end courtesans, on the other hand, have much better earning prospects in comparison, so the scenario they usually plan for is earning enough money until the age of 40 to basically last for a lifetime after proper investment. If they can get married, that’s even better, of course, but it isn’t necessary for thriving.

As per the oft-misattributed quote, they aren't paying her for what she does, but to leave afterward.

Do women who conceive themselves as selling themselves get looked on kindly? I think if there is evidence they don't like their husbands and are just marrying as a resource transaction, they will be judged fairly negatively.

As far as I'm aware marriage for love was quite rare in the era before the suffrage.

You might say that wives probably liked their husbands some, even if it was usually not the primary stimulus for marriage, but then I'm willing to believe high-end escorts like their clients some as well. It's not like liking your job is entirely unheard of when you're not working in a gutter.

In the west, traditional courtship might not be romance by modern standards, but they would usually have considered themselves as 'in love' on their wedding day for hundreds of years. Upper class arranged marriages were the exception.

As far as I'm aware marriage for love was quite rare in the era before the suffrage.

In cisHajnal societies, middle-class and below young men and women chose their own partners, and presumably took sexual attraction into account when choosing. The date this pattern arises is not clear, but definitely before 1400. Dating pools were much smaller and there was more pressure to settle, but it was closer to the modern system immediately before dating apps than it was to parentally-arranged marriage.

Yeah I mean I've had friends who've gone through the Indian arranged marriage process and like even when a good match is found there's still a meeting or two to see if there's any immediate chemistry, then go from there. It's rare (though I'm sure it does happen sometimes in certain poorer regions) that a modern, affluent Indian arranged marriage is done at knifepoint where one party is an obese 75 year old slumlord and the other part is a 18 year old with hopes of romance.

Yeah from what I've gathered knowing Indian immigrant tech workers it is lots of phone calls, in person meetings, meeting family members, etc. It's just not dating in a modern sense. There's a lot more involvement than "my parents assigned me someone".

Sworn men have always been looked on more kindly than mercenaries. For that matter, so have people who change companies every two years. People distrust those whose loyalties seem too loose.

It is not unusual for escorts in NZ to work full-time corporate day-jobs, because if you wish to buy a house in this economy, it just makes sense to put a price tag on the goods your genetics so generously gifted you with. And the number of johns willing to cough up their entire week's paycheck for a couple hours of your negotiable affection is not insignificant. Welcome to capitalism, baby!

I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

Wouldn't sex work count as physical labour? Also, electricians make bank in NZ. Their wages are only gonna go up as population ages and the pool of able-bodied young men busting their asses in physical labour starts shrinking.

Also, electricians make bank in NZ.

Your definition of bank is very parochial and whilst ANZ tradies are in a great position (though I'm pretty sure New Zealanders happily flee over to Australia to get the 50% wage premium) that could always disappear in an instant if their unions ever submit to the pressure to let immigrants on the tools.

If they're anything like US unions, they will not do this.

US have way more pressure from random Hispanic day laborers in construction than anything in ANZ I believe. Also in a situation where there is a genuine shortage and the Boomer class feel that their right to cheap renovations are being impinged upon I don't see how the unions are totally unbreakable.

The US largely broke the unions for the lower construction hierarchy jobs- roofers and the like. But the pipe trades and electrical unions are going strong. They’re not the norm in my state, but they’ve got their own niche.

Australia has huge immigration but strong trades protectionism so only like 2% of immigrants end up working in construction

Even regardless of the moral aspect of the situation, the fact that a prostitute can make so much money is a huge slap in the face to people working hard for a living.

Dude, you're in corporate marketing. Complaining about what whores make is a bit ironic.

If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society?

Somebody's gotta do the disgusting jobs, and it makes sense that they'd pay well if few want and/or are able to do them compared to the demand for them.

What a pleasant comment! No actually, I do not think marketing is equivalent to prostitution. I admit that it has moral qualms but I do mostly on site a/b testing, so I don’t lose sleep at night.

Someone does indeed have to do the disgusting jobs, but we can still comment on the state of society and the market based on the policies and general cultural values we have enacted. Once again your approach here, as always, is extremely defeatist.

There's no real comment on cultural values from what whores earn, only economic ones; this is just supply and demand as applied to jobs you find distasteful for some reason. And you may not like supply and demand, but that dislike is about as useful as not liking the second law of thermodynamics; it's going to work anyway.

I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.

Meanwhile, in the gospel of Mark:

And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.

And of course, long before that, in the book of Esther:

Then said the king unto her, What wilt thou, queen Esther? and what is thy request? it shall be even given thee to the half of the kingdom.

Going by memory: that's Herod's stepdaughter fathered by his dead brother and I believe aunt through incestuous marriage. He then married his widowed aunt/sister-in-law. John the Baptist was killed for criticizing this doubly forbidden marriage; as young Salome demands his head after dancing. She's not a courtesan getting the king horny, she's his stepdaughter. Unless you imagined some higher grosser level of incest where he goes for his aunt and niece.

She's not a courtesan getting the king horny, she's his stepdaughter

Historian estimate she was a literal child as well. Later writers invented the titillating stuff with the veils, whereas the original story was that Herod saw a little girl do a dance, thought it was cute and promised her anything she wanted (expecting her to not ask for much, since she's a child).

Her mother then made her ask for John the Baptist's head.

This exchange reminds me of an old poem by the Finland-Swede Bertel Gripenberg. I permit myself a very self-indulgent excursion.

Begär vad du vill, Salome, jag kan icke säga nej, och bad du om Döparens huvud, vid Gud, jag nekade ej! Vad äro himlens profeter mot jorden fagraste mö! En vink av din hand, Salome, och Döparen måste dö!

En Gud som vi icke känna, en himmel som ingen sett, och hotande ord som larma om straffet och helvetet, vem bytte väl ej all denna bedrägliga sagoskatt mot jordens skönaste kvinna och livets ljuvaste natt!

In my own rough and quick translation:

Ask what you wish, Salome, I cannot tell you no, and if you asked for the Baptist's head, by God, I'd make it so! What are the prophets of heaven to the fairest maiden of all! A sign of your hand, Salome, and the Baptist must fall!

A God we do not know, a heaven which none can tell, and darkened words that threaten us, with punishment and hell. Who would not give up all of this fraudulent fairy-tale gold, for the fairest women on Earth in sweetest pleasure-night to hold!

In practice, do you think either could have actually gotten "half of the kingdom" if they said that? Or is that effectively an indirect marriage proposal?

Half? You can get a man to give up his entire kingdom!

"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" -Richard III

"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

That isn't a nice thing to say about Camilla Parker-Bowles.

The niche tastes cost the most.

Herodias' daughter got the head of John the Baptist, which by most accounts is worth rather more than half the kingdom. (Note that this isn't Herod the Great, it's his younger son Herod Antipas who ruled a postage-stamp size kingdom in Galilee as a client of the Roman Empire).

Can you unpack some of the context here for me? You’re just saying women suck essentially?

No, he’s saying there’s nothing new about women gaining obscene amounts of money/power if they can suck well (so to speak)

I'm saying women extracting ludicrous amounts of wealth from men simply by being hot is something that's been going on for millennia.

It makes sense, because female hotness is normally perishable.

Ok, fair. I'm aware it's not necessarily anything new under the sun. I suppose it just feels extremely brazen at the moment, but hey what do I know. Apparently it used to be pretty much the same.

Courtesans have been a thing forever.

Yeah, it's a rare positive sign for modern sexual morality that many of us have forgotten the distinction between lower class prostitutes and upper class ones and assume the latter doesn’t exist.

That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.

Healthcare jobs are, uh, real jobs and as a society gets richer the demand for healthcare increases.

If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society?

One of these things is not like the others. Do you propose simply killing the boomers? If not, somebody's got to take care of them, and we haven't hit peak boomer retirement yet.

On a related note, I suggest that we categorize prostitutes as healthcare workers, basically.

In countries where prostitution is legal, there has been some controversy on basically this topic—whether disabled people should be able to pay for prostitutes using government disability insurance.

Do you propose simply killing the boomers? If not, somebody's got to take care of them, and we haven't hit peak boomer retirement yet.

There's shades between 'Mandatory execution at 70' and 'Let us commit endless resources to squeeze every possible additional moment out of boomer lifespans'. There's a plethora of medical jobs and procedures which are difficult, require large investments of education and equipment and yet make essentially no sense from any sort of $/QALY metric.

Sure. Unfortunately, cutting off the spigot that keeps grandma alive isn't popular with grandma or her kids, for the most part. Personally, I'm 100% in favor of Medicare death panels. I suspect it's a minority position though.

Healthcare jobs are, uh, real jobs and as a society gets richer the demand for healthcare increases.

Yes they are real jobs, but they're also extremely menial and service focused. I suppose you can take a certain pride in your work, but there's also the fact that young people are already being taxed a huge proportion of their income going to elders. So you're being taxed so you can get the money recycled back to you serving as a servant basically to old people you don't know. Pretty dark if you ask me.

they're also extremely menial

The healthcare sector includes everything from asswipers to orthopedic surgeons to pharma r&d. Not all of these are menial.

service focused

Sure, but you already work in the service sector, along with 80% of Americans.

there's also the fact that young people are already being taxed a huge proportion of their income going to elders.

This is indeed bad, but one must hope the present levels of spending will prove unsustainable with a bigger dependency ratio.

So you're being taxed so you can get the money recycled back to you serving as a servant basically to old people you don't know.

Anybody on the receiving end of the $7T of government spending (including, for example, highly paid Amazon engineers) is also in this situation. I'd rather the government did and spent less, but it's hardly an apocalyptic scenario.

As @KMC said, you are being a bit disingenuous here. The vast majority of actual job growth has been menial healthcare jobs.

I do work in the service sector in a way I suppose, but I mostly do onsite product marketing. Depends on how you define "service."

I'm not necessarily saying it's an apocalyptic scenario, though it may well turn into one if we don't course correct somewhat soon. What I'm saying is that my personal experience and outlook on economic participation is getting more and more bleak.

The vast majority of actual job growth has been menial healthcare jobs.

Debatable. There's 400k more RNs than there were ten years ago. I'd say being an RN is no more menial than being an onsite product marketer.

I do work in the service sector in a way I suppose, but I mostly do onsite product marketing. Depends on how you define "service."

I think it's pretty unambiguous. Do you grow crops? Do you extract resources from the earth? Do you produce any physical goods?

Have you spoken to RNs? One of my close friends is one. It's extremely menial, if by menial you mean physically demanding and focusing on servicing other people directly.

My mother wasn't home most evenings when I was between ages 4 and 7 because she was going to night school to become an RN, which paid more than my dad's job as a machinist. No, they aren't doctors, but most of the menial work you describe is done by Aides, LPNs, Medical Assistants, orderlies, and housekeepers. You don't need a degree to empty bedpans. I doubt the state has any mandatory training requirements for whatever you do, but you don't seem to consider it menial.

Most Americans are already employed in servicing other people directly! I don't think that most Americans would be working a menial job if they had to walk around rather than sit at a desk to do what it is they do.

Isn't this almost tautologically true? Jobs aren't supposed to be not in the service of helping meet the needs of others. I suppose "subsistence farmer" doesn't do that directly, but as far as I know, nobody is making paperclips qua paperclips in capitalism, but because people are buying paperclips.

Maybe if you have a command economy and a five year plan for paperclip production regardless of paperclip use.

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When healthcare is the largest employer in most states, it isn't because of all the orthopedic surgeons that are employed.

Did I imply that healthcare employment is solely due to orthopedic surgeons?

The healthcare sector includes everything from asswipers to orthopedic surgeons to pharma r&d. Not all of these are menial.

Here you implied that simply because not everything is menial, that the vast majority of jobs in the sector aren't menial. That's wrong, they are menial, and that's why there's so much employment. The top of the pyramid doesn't change that.

The question is not whether X% are menial or not. The question is whether marginal new healthcare jobs are more menial than the marginal new non healthcare job. My contention is that it isn't.

If it makes you feel any better, a guy like Dac Prescott makes more in one weekend than you probably will after taxes in your entire working career, though it can be argued that he has to do more for the money. I wouldn't worry too much about AI. If it were all it's cracked up to be you'd have heard at least one story about someone who is making high-end prostitute level income from software he wrote without the help of a staff, and if such stories exist (cue links to prove I'm an idiot), they aren't being heavily publicized. Instead all you hear about is how software companies are telling their employees to use more AI, a trend that appears to be coming to an end now that the bills are in the mail. Supposedly on unnamed company spent $500 million on Claude in a single month, and the rumor is that it's Microsoft, as they cancelled their subscription recently. I don't know if this story is true, but if the impressive Q1 revenue growth shown by these companies was due to the short-lived tokenmaxing trend, there may be some pain when they don't look so good next time around.

Are they still flogging this horse of "the inner secrets of the weird sex lives of Silicon Valley nerds"? 'Guys with lots of disposable income and no regular girlfriends hire escorts, shock horror!' well lands sakes Zephaniah, what are the youth of today coming to at all?

Worse…they’re weird escorts!

Such is the burden of tabloid news.

what are the youth of today coming to at all?

High-end hookers, apparently

Pardon me while I reel back in horror onto the fainting couch and apply hartshorn to recruit my failing senses! Men pay for sex, you don't say! Mercy me! 🤣

It'd be more of a story if it was "well-off single men without wives or girlfriends don't pay attractive, intelligent women for negotiable affection".

Please use periods. We have standards here on proper grammar, dangit!

aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money.

If it were an easy niche to fill, the price would be driven down. Aella is genuinely a uniquely talented person in her ability to occupy the two different niches involved at the same time. That's obvious when I listen to her on podcast appearances.

Also her ability to not get caught. That is where most of the value add is.

Who is trying to catch her? These women are getting glowing hagiographies in Forbes, for Christ’s sake. They are not in serious danger of going to jail for breaking the laws around prostitution in California.

Are there even laws around prostitution in California? Genuine query but I'm too damn lazy to give two minutes to look it up.

Yes. California is progressive, it is very much not libertine.

Yes.

Prostitution is entirely illegal under state law in 48 of the US's 50 states. (Nevada has devolved to its less populated counties (not including Las Vegas) the ability to permit brothels. Maine punishes only the buyer of sex, not the seller.)

Maine punishes only the buyer of sex, not the seller.)

Here’s how Susan Collins can still win

I think the workaround for escorts is generally that you are not paying for the sex, you are paying them to keep you company, and it is hard for the state to prove if any sex takes place and if so if it was part of a transaction.

Also, rich people's vices do not have the social costs of poor people's vices, generally, and therefore are more tolerated. If some banker wants to do cocaine, that is mostly a victimless crime -- he is very unlikely to stab a guy to steal his wallet to pay for his next fix.

Lower class prostitution definitely has some externalities. A prostitute who receives her customers in her flat or walks the street of some neighborhood will definitely affect the quality of living of her neighbors even before you add pimps and organized crime. With high-end prostitution, these things are simply not a concern -- if the john is renting a fancy hotel suite, then the hotel will gladly deal with all the inconveniences their fornication imposes on the neighborhood.

Also, if we start prosecuting every sexual relation which was mediated by the expenditure of material goods, half the country would be in jail. There are probably cases of some guy getting laid despite owning only the clothes on his back, but as a general rule being poor will decrease your SMV. I am not sure if anyone has done a RCT on this, but if taking your date out for some fries salvaged from the McDonalds garbage bin resulted in as much sex as treating her to a three-course menu, half of the demand for fine dining would probably go away.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/contact-and-directory/anonymous-tip-lines

San Francisco is a haven for criminals. Cops won't even bother showing up for car break ins. Fill out that web form and watch nothing happen.

If I thought this had even a 1% chance of working I would try it. Alas...

I have to disagree. In my experience I feel like the whore market is one of the least well arbitraged markets in the world.

One limit to arbitrage would be that market participants have a limited shelf-life to figure out the market and outsourcing to management (pimping) is much enforced criminally. And sharing information and tactics online seems more difficult than other markets.

I am going to assume the very best girls don’t even become whores. Steve Jobs wife would never become a whore because Stanford MBA and attractive makes it trivially easy for her to marry well. So I feel the supply side of the whore market can’t be power law because the far right tail just does marriage. Depending on your taste the far right tail of females are Tom Brady or Steve Jobs wives.

And then you have Miami. Where the strip clubs are basically brothels and like $500 gets you a girl hotter than these SF escorts. The price in Miami really is 5-10% of San Francisco. If you believe these girls and their $4k/hour claims.

So my guess is this is much more a story of market inefficiency. Some girls probably did find a magic marketing technique and location. And few hot girls want to live in San Francisco. So the high price is a lack of knowledge by other whores on marketing and a huge premium for having to live in San Francisco.

I believe a lot of this is just search costs. Whores don’t know how to market to tech nerds. Tech nerds don’t know how to find whores. The ones that know how to connect the two make a lot.

I am going to assume the very best girls don’t even become whores. Steve Jobs wife would never become a whore because Stanford MBA and attractive makes it trivially easy for her to marry well. So I feel the supply side of the whore market can’t be power law because the far right tail just does marriage. Depending on your taste the far right tail of females are Tom Brady or Steve Jobs wives.

And then you have Miami. Where the strip clubs are basically brothels and like $500 gets you a girl hotter than these SF escorts. The price in Miami really is 5-10% of San Francisco. If you believe these girls and their $4k/hour claims.

So my guess is this is much more a story of market inefficiency. Some girls probably did find a magic marketing technique and location. And few hot girls want to live in San Francisco. So the high price is a lack of knowledge by other whores on marketing and a huge premium for having to live in San Francisco.

I believe a lot of this is just search costs. Whores don’t know how to market to tech nerds. Tech nerds don’t know how to find whores. The ones that know how to connect the two make a lot.

Listen I get all this, this all makes sense to me. What I'm saying is that the subset of women who are likely to become escorts don't get this and it doesn't make sense to them. Start talking to them about arbitrage and they'll fall asleep before you finish, in either sense.

You don't have to be a genius at economics to understand "Less hot girls are making more money than you in escorting while doing less. If you want to make more money, you just need move to where there are more rich, lonely, awkward guys." While I don't finish that fast, I'm pretty sure you don't need to elaborate much more for this to be within intellectual reach of anyone with an IQ of 95. Probably 90.

And I think the market situation tells us, clearly, that women with high enough IQ to comprehend and execute that plan, while also being willing to be prostitutes and prostitutes to nerds, are in short supply.

I am not convinced. Per google, the most expensive bottles of wine cost about half a million. This does not mean that there is a supply shortage of wine, merely that weird things happen when the uberrich engage in bidding wars. If the median price for an escort in SV was 10k$, then I would conclude that there is indeed a supply shortage.

Those bottles of wine are in short supply. If you can't comprehend of being in the market for those bottles of wine or those escorts, then you probably just don't understand the market in question. "Weird things happen when people engage in bidding wars" isn't an explanation, why is there a bidding war if there is infinite supply?

I think that with goods for conspicuous consumption, the price finding works a little different than for other goods.

Any vintner deciding to make fifty millions by just producing 100 bottles of a wine which is worth 500k$ a bottle will fail miserably, because the very fact that there are 100 bottles on the market will cap the price.

If anyone in SV is spending 30k$/weekend on an escort, that is obviously conspicuous consumption. The point is to signal that he can spend that much money. The identity of the escort is secondary, could be a former porn star, or Aella, the important thing is that his buddies have heard of her. If his buddy replies that he spend 10k$ on hiring an escort who is just as hot and smart as Aella, but much less famous, that has much less signaling value.

I think the bottleneck is not being hot and smart, it is being famous. There are thousands of actors in Hollywood who are pretty great actors. Most of them do not earn outrageous sums per movie, because a film-maker will have a hard time to persuade the audience that they are indeed good. The top tier actors will reliably draw a crowd because they have a large fan base, and being able to pay them millions is a good signal for the movie having a high production value, so the special effects will also be great.

When you said:

women with high enough IQ to comprehend and execute that plan, while also being willing to be prostitutes and prostitutes to nerds, are in short supply.

that rings to me like

Tom Cruise makes 100M$ per movie, so $ADJECTIVES actors like him are in short supply.

To which I would reply that obviously Tom Cruise is in short supply (likely intentionally as a business decision). However, all of that is due to him being famous. A nobody with his acting talent and looks entering Hollywood would probably land some roles, but would make absolute peanuts compared to him unless he got lucky and rose to the top, and anyone contemplating to go to LA and shoot movies or to SV and work as an escort would be served much better by anchoring on the median income of their peers than on the top earners.

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The funny thing about those bottles of wine is I believe there have been a few cases of counterfeiter just mixing cheap stuff and labeling it different. And they got away with it for years until they were caught. So the drinkers didn’t know the difference.

My gut says the $4k hookers are a lot like the wine and it’s marketing + badly informed consumer with a lot of money.

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The art of the courtesan, revived?

They just keep reinventing the wheel.

Dang, you beat me to the Noticing

An article

It says "a small group of high-end companions" right at the top (before the paywall). These numbers obviously are not representative. A cursory Internet search indicates that, in places where prostitution (including advertising) is legal, prices are 200 US dollars per hour, not 5000.

And that's before we get into the gradations of the scale from "streetwalker down by the docks" up to "hetaira who provides sparkling wit and entertainment at the symposia".

Exactly. People are focusing way too much on pure physical attractiveness as the definition of one's value in the sexual marketplace. Aella and her ilk have clout + can likely offer mental stimulation to their clientele that the Miami equivalent couldn't.

I'm pretty turned off by sex work (despite not minding its legality so long as safe and consensual) and I'd rather do the Aella GFE than Miami's greatest 11/10 for an evening personally, and I'd expect my tastes align with most of the SV rich-types.

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