We're the nation that spends over $100 million dollars of federal money every year on abstinence-only sex education programs[1]. You still can't show titties on broadcast TV.
The fact that all instructors are actually models is obviously cringy, and that would certainly not be on youtube (although there are many similar channels with thinly dressed models) but to call it softcore porn is too much. It is arousing, but there is no simulated sex or anything evwn close to that.
Poses seem correct too, so even if they are models they know yoga too. Certain yoga poses are sensual even when you don't want to be sensual, I find the idea of naked yoga actually genius
Well, considering porn is opposed hard on religious ground and most countries are more or less influenced by religions, especially Islam who respond the most on it, not really.
Weird, I wouldn't have expected beauty would be a qualifier for teaching yoga. Nor would I have expected "uncensored photo sets" to be a dot point on an education site.
Beauty is an indicator of health and fitness, so it's not at all surprising to me that it's so often a qualifier for teaching in fitness fields. That's not unique to naked yoga, I've never seen an ugly personal trainer.
That's too general. "Ugly" has too many dimensions. For example, a lot of women would consider most of the latest "Mr. Olympia" contestants as grotesque and ugly. One could also be greatly fit and still have an extremely unattractive face.
Now, if you want to say that you've never seen a successful, out-of-shape personal trainer, I'd probably concede that. Being in-shape is marketing for the expertise you are taking payment for.
Beauty is a philosophical question that depends on cultural values, so you can't make a general assumption out of it.
For example, 400 years ago small breasts are considered beauty. You can't say the same today and instead had turned 180 into "small boobs shame" among the youth.
Like another poster said, this seems like more overpolicing to not get caught up by sesta/fosta. The site gives off a bunch of pornography red flags between its phrasing in the copy, and the fact that all of its teachers appear to be models and not just physically fit humans. If this government was willing to go after my business for supporting pornography, and I had to decide if this site would fall under the government's definition(I know it when I see it[1]), this would be a zero hesitation decision to bin as porn.
edit: adding on to their porn flags, their main splash page updates the image everytime you navigate to it. It appears to be entirely comprised of images of the top half of their female models showing neither their male models or any full yoga poses. This is the kind of tongue in cheek "were totally not engaging in that behavior you said wasn't allowed" setup that isn't going to convince the government you're regular non porn content
I can’t imagine saying with a straight face that the legality of nude videos would depend on how attractive (according to some standard) the people in the videos are.
Not exactly a new concept in law. Take pornography out of it and look at businesses like hooters who can require their waitresses to be attractive to because they are hiring “models” and not regular actors. Their level of attractiveness is explicitly changing the laws involved.
If it’s problematic for you take it up with the courts, these sorts of things were decided long before I was born
I don't think we have worldviews that overlap well enough to discuss this then. If you cant see where the logic is coming from, regardless of if you agree with the logic, then I can only point you towards the governments definition of obscenity I linked in my first comment and suggest you read on the legal theory from there.
This seems more like a disagreement about the basic meanings of words, not anything about worldview. In what way is this Hooters employment issue at all similar to this naked yoga issue?
I watched a trailer from the website. It may fill a niche, but to my female eye the website doesn't scream "exaggerated sexuality". It's more akin to nude art than to pornography.
Unless people like beautiful content? Shelter doesn’t need to be beautiful either but weirdly people like looking at photos and videos of beautiful houses.
Oh but private business, blah blah blah, which I support or denounce based on my current view point.
Really if the eff wants to take on nonsexual nudity then the payment processors and social media platforms aren't the starting point. They're way down the list. First start with topless equality recognized nation wide in the USA. Not just in public but also in print and broadcast media. Get the FCCs indecency regulations revised. Probably a good thing would be elimination of the FCC if free speech is your goal.
> Stripe gave True Naked Yoga just four days’ notice before the account was closed.
This is the problem. Four days is ridiculous in a circumstance where the business or content hasn't changed and it's just Stripe who changed their mind.
I think that payment processors should be required to offer service to any legal business. If you do business on the internet you need a payment processor, and defacto need one in the real world. The fact that they can destroy a business on a whim shouldn't be legal.
It's not the payment processors' fault (but MasterCard and Visa's oligopoly does need to be shattered), it is the banks'. They (more specifically, the network of banks that handle most payment processing) are at the foundation (read, have a strangehold on) of every financial infrastructure, be it technological or human. If they deny service, non-crypto fintechs have no real recourse. Moral pearl clutching aside, the issue of fraud for these sort of services is also unsolved. That is why companies that service this particular vertical charge ridiculous fees. There needs to be a separate non-revocable class of payments (maybe something like Zelle) for these industries.
I wonder how this fits into antitrust laws if all payment processors start banning legal businesses, it in my opinion should fall under antitrust violations.
This is also how I felt about Apple's anti porn stance.
You block porn apps on the app store. You block custom browsers on the app store. So the only way to consume porn is to use Safari/WebKit. That seems anti-competitive to me.
An argument can be made that it would benefit the student to see the exact shape of muscles. When I study dance, it's much easier when the instructors wear either swimwear or clothing that makes seeing their muscles and joint movements easier.
I don't understand this "payment processor police" concept that private companies are trying to take on. We don't need moral police on where we spend money. Block illegal stuff and suspicious activity and everything else is a free for all. I don't need stripe or visa or anybody else filtering my stuff or my kids stuff. I'll take care of that.
pretty sure that's why they blocked pornhub and them: neither the banks, nor visa etc have any desire or capacity to tell "legal stuff" from "illegal stuff", how do you even picture they go about that?
I would not be surprised to see that this is more fallout from sesta/fosta, the exodus cry incident with pornhub, and payment processors just going along with the hysteria.
the anti-pornography crusaders have really escalated things over the past few years.
While I don't want to defend the anti porn people, it is worth noting that pornography itself has escalated just as much if not more over the past few years. The availability and diversity of every type of porn content imaginable has never been greater and it's much much harder to avoid porn on the internet. Logically this would mean that those who are against porn would want to step up their game.
porn isnt the issue - its porn sites that are the problem. the features of those sites are, like facebook, designed to keep you engaged as long as possible, and are designed to keep a user going further and further down the rabbit hole of kinks and fetishes. this is a lot different from the magazine or vhs porn media in the 80s/90s, or the theaters in the 60's/70s, or even the pre-facebook internet up til 2011.
im not anti all porn and nudity - i am anti internet porn.
Eh, most likely not. Having worked in the payment space, pornography has some of the highest rates of credit card fraud and charge backs. It's a nightmare for everyone involved.
Businesses like payment processors should not be allowed to refuse to provide their services to any legal clients. And legality is up to the courts to decide not payment processors or any other middlemen.
If enough people really want to ban porn (I don't know or care if this particular site was really porn) then go through the proper channels, and make a law explicitly banning it don't try to get private companies to do the work of enforcing arbitary rules.
In many cases, I suspect providers would love if this was illegal, as they likely dislike being forced by the public to become arbiters of decency (thinking especially of Cloudflare banning trolls).
The balance, according to my limited understanding, is that certain types of activity including porn-adjacent sites have much higher card failure rates, so banning some activity is a way to reduce chargeback costs falling on Stripe's shoulders.
> The balance, according to my limited understanding, is that certain types of activity including porn-adjacent sites have much higher card failure rates, so banning some activity is a way to reduce chargeback costs falling on Stripe's shoulders.
In that case, wouldn't the solution be to charge higher processing fees (possibly much higher) for websites in that category? Why ban them entirely?
No, because the logical penalty for miscategorization is adjustment to the correct fees. The penalty for getting around a banned category is that they steal your money. In many cases it is very large amounts.
Doesn't this go back to the whole "if you don't like it build your own" argument that wrongthinkers have had to listen to for years? A business isn't required to support content they don't agree with, or something.
I agree it's bullshit, but it shouldn't only be called out when it affects the right people.
> then go through the proper channels, and make a law explicitly banning it don't try to get private companies to do the work of enforcing arbitary rules.
I think one of the effects of the gridlock in US politics is that more and more actual policy is now implemented by circumventing the "normal" lawmaking process: e.g. through executive orders, court decisions or appeals to private companies or citizens.
Whichever side you're on, this can't be a good thing for a democracy.
Enforcement of social norms through convincing private actors to behave in certain ways in preference to government actions is a major point of the First Amendment, not a circumvention of the normal lawmaking process.
This idea is fundamentally at odds with the framework of US jurisprudence. It would require changing the Constitution: namely butchering the 1st Amendment.
Forcing companies to do business with everyone creates a ton of wrong incentives as well.
A law banning porn. Woof. Enough has already been written about that one.
> This idea is fundamentally at odds with the framework of US jurisprudence.
Applying common-carrier rules to a particular, already highly-regulated, key industry to commerce is not “fundamentally at odds with the framework of US jurisprudence”.
> It would require changing the Constitution: namely butchering the 1st Amendment.
No, it wouldn’t. Just like it didn’t when we did it to telecoms.
Then payment processors either need to either 1) be able to determine with 100% certainty whether something is legal or 2) be given broad immunity with respect to customers' illegal activities as long as they weren't strictly aware. The problem is that 1) is not possible and 2) incentivizes these intermediaries from keeping track of what their customers do, which then opens door to all kinds of criminal activities. Money laundering becomes virtually impossible to prosecute in that environment, which then makes other criminal activities substantially more profitable.
If I were to list my top 10 problems in life, money laundering would not make the list. I would like payment processors to operate like common carriers. I prefer not having private law enforcement, and having it done by government agencies.
The extent to which I want the government to have access to my day-to-day purchases is another matter, but even that's better than commercial operations where I have no recourse.
Money laundering isn't a big problem for you right now precisely because the world works the way it does, rather than the way you wish it did. The relationship between money laundering and corruption is well-established and globally, corruption is one of the biggest problems if you care about human welfare.
If I were to make a list of my top-10 problems, corruption would be near the top. None of the cases I've seen involved money laundering.
If I were to make a trade-off, I would implement many more transparency measures for organizations, not for individuals. If I can see what happens in my local school, municipal government, corporation, university, church, and non-profit, that would cut down on all the corruption I've seen, dramatically. I see no downsides to transparency measures which don't impact individuals, and they have a lot more impact than corporations snooping on me.
Indeed, in one case I saw corruption, corporate snooping meant that the corrupt place had more leverage over a whistleblower. That's no good.
If you don't understand the connection between money laundering and corruption, you certainly do not have a very strong understanding of the problem of corruption. Also, good luck having "transparency measures" in a world where intermediaries are allowed immunity as long as they don't know stuff.
Nice. Switch from discussion to insults. Anyone who doesn't agree with you is clearly an idiot who doesn't understand things.
Yes, I do understand the connection between corruption and money laundering. That touches on one form of corruption. There are many others. If I were to eliminate corruption, I'd take measures like:
- Extend laws like FOIA and Open Meetings, dramatically, so we have a much clearer understanding of government. In particular, I'd extend enforcement and penalties. Wilful violations should be criminal.
- Extend such laws to cover non-profits as well. I should be able to ask a church, a university, or any other organization exempt from taxes for documents, or sit in on governance meetings.
- Put in stronger whistleblower protections, and eliminate a lot of the power of NDA / non-disparage / etc agreements
- Increase SEC-mandated transparency measures
... and so on. Those have nothing to do with money laundering, and to me, are strict wins.
Very little of the corruption I've seen involves bags of money. Most corruption involves things like (not directly financial) preferential treatment. If I give you a raise you don't deserve, give your child preferential treatment at my school, or cut a sweet deal for your company, that doesn't show up in a Paypal transaction.
> Very little of the corruption I've seen involves bags of money.
As I said, that's precisely because the world works the way it does, rather than the way you wish it did. The bottleneck for lots of otherwise extremely profitable criminal endeavors is their reliance on traditional financial intermediaries.
> That touches on one form of corruption.
I'm talking about the type of corruption that keeps entire countries from developing economically. I don't know what you're on about. And no, your series of suggestions, which amount to saying make the current regulations stronger, doesn't come close to closing a huge loophole created by giving blanket immunity to financial intermediaries.
Edit: honestly it sounds like you ran into some unfortunate situation somewhere and hold a personal grudge. But that's not a particularly meaningful basis for policy recommendation, especially given that it's quite clear that you don't understand the domain particularly well.
> Most corruption involves things like (not directly financial) preferential treatment. If I give you a raise you don't deserve, give your child preferential treatment at my school, or cut a sweet deal for your company, that doesn't show up in a Paypal transaction.
Most corruption is like this when you live in a country where corruption isn't much of a problem.
With all due respect, you have no idea who I am, what my background is, where I lived, or what I know. If you wanted to argue facts, that'd be one thing. I could pull up citations. Personal attacks, I just don't feel like engaging with.
It's not that hard to infer that you know very little about the topic at hand, but you think you know, because reasons. Your comments remind me of the other time I had to engage with complete nonsense from someone who was oddly confident about their position, despite clearly having no idea they are talking about (to be fair, you're not nearly as bad as the other person, who was unironically arguing for freezing the entire global credit market to avoid the coming COVID apocalypse of small business failures) - just because you can put together some words that appear to make sense if you don't think deeply enough or have no context, doesn't mean the resulting output makes any sense.
No, you can't infer how much someone knows about a topic, at least from the discussion here. You can infer they know something different than you do. That happens when you get a modern-day Republican and Democrat in the same room, and each believes the other to be an idiot. The same happens if people are from different countries, cultures, or hold different values.
Groups develop groupthink, with a common set of information, logic, and conclusions. It's natural to assume anyone who doesn't share those is an idiot. My own experience is that they're often not idiots, and if I go in with an open mind, I often learn something (and quite often, we both do), although that's been harder with recent political polarization. Nowadays, discussions usually shift to people calling me an idiot if I don't line up 100% with their worldview. It's been rarer and rarer to have intelligent discussions.
Perhaps my conclusions were wrong. They often are; on average, we're right about half the time in discussions, and that's fine. Perhaps yours are too. Perhaps we're right in different contexts (we might live in different countries, for example).
However, where you took this discussion, neither of us has any chance of discovering what the other's opinions were informed by. If you doubt something I'm saying, you can ask for evidence, rather than assuming and insulting. Perhaps each of us might have learned something.
In either case, that's as far as I'm willing to take this discussion. I nerd on topics like these for fun. Getting insulted is tiring and draining rather than fun. You're welcome to believe I'm an idiot.
I propose we terminate this discussion. People are welcome to be wrong on the internet.
This has nothing to do with worldviews. It's just that a statement like this:
> If I were to make a list of my top-10 problems, corruption would be near the top. None of the cases I've seen involved money laundering.
rather clearly reveals your lack of understanding of the topic at hand. The fact that you think this has anything to do with political polarization is another clue that you have no idea what you're talking about. Your repeated attempts to anchor all of this to your personal experience are also quite revealing with respect to both your bias and lack of grounding in the subject.
And this isn't about your conclusions being wrong - it's just that you (and people like you) seem to form absurdly strong opinions when you don't even have the slightest clue regarding why things are the way they are.
Btw, since you are now pretending that you were this intellectually eager person just trying to have an honest discussion and I somehow poisoned the exchange, let me remind you that this was your first contribution:
> If I were to list my top 10 problems in life, money laundering would not make the list.
Which, of course, is combative, dismissive and arrogant. Why on earth is your personal list of "top 10 problems in life" relevant to any discussion? Who the hell do you think you are? It's the type of response that immediately signals lack of interest in learning anything, which you have since confirmed.
> I'm done here.
> I propose we terminate this discussion
You can do whatever you want - is your next reply also going to mention how you're really done this time?
Can this be a great business opportunity? Or, if you try to fill in for Stripe in this case, you'll run into some non-obvious blockers upstream? maybe the parties Stripe is dealing with will penalize porn and stuff, so it's not even up to Stripe? or not?
> Or, if you try to fill in for Stripe in this case, you'll run into some non-obvious blockers upstream?
I know nothing about this industry but I would kind of assume the problem is with the credit card companies themselves (Visa and MasterCard), who are probably concerned with brand safety or some such.
Prostitution and sex work should just be made legal, a business like any other. That would in turn protect businesses like this one, which is censored for its being wrongly perceived as some kind of sex work.
85 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] threadCan the EFF not tell porn when they see it? Is softcore porn no longer porn?
not to mention, even if it is porn, who cares? are we such a nation of five year olds and nanny businesses that we can't be trusted with a titty?
So... the answer to your question is "yes".
[1] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/abstinence-only-progra...
Weird, I wouldn't have expected beauty would be a qualifier for teaching yoga. Nor would I have expected "uncensored photo sets" to be a dot point on an education site.
Unless.
That's too general. "Ugly" has too many dimensions. For example, a lot of women would consider most of the latest "Mr. Olympia" contestants as grotesque and ugly. One could also be greatly fit and still have an extremely unattractive face.
Now, if you want to say that you've never seen a successful, out-of-shape personal trainer, I'd probably concede that. Being in-shape is marketing for the expertise you are taking payment for.
For example, 400 years ago small breasts are considered beauty. You can't say the same today and instead had turned 180 into "small boobs shame" among the youth.
edit: adding on to their porn flags, their main splash page updates the image everytime you navigate to it. It appears to be entirely comprised of images of the top half of their female models showing neither their male models or any full yoga poses. This is the kind of tongue in cheek "were totally not engaging in that behavior you said wasn't allowed" setup that isn't going to convince the government you're regular non porn content
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
If it’s problematic for you take it up with the courts, these sorts of things were decided long before I was born
am I only allowed to have sex if I'm married in a church you approve of?
Really if the eff wants to take on nonsexual nudity then the payment processors and social media platforms aren't the starting point. They're way down the list. First start with topless equality recognized nation wide in the USA. Not just in public but also in print and broadcast media. Get the FCCs indecency regulations revised. Probably a good thing would be elimination of the FCC if free speech is your goal.
This is the problem. Four days is ridiculous in a circumstance where the business or content hasn't changed and it's just Stripe who changed their mind.
It should be 60 days in these circumstances.
You block porn apps on the app store. You block custom browsers on the app store. So the only way to consume porn is to use Safari/WebKit. That seems anti-competitive to me.
the anti-pornography crusaders have really escalated things over the past few years.
im not anti all porn and nudity - i am anti internet porn.
Businesses like payment processors should not be allowed to refuse to provide their services to any legal clients. And legality is up to the courts to decide not payment processors or any other middlemen.
If enough people really want to ban porn (I don't know or care if this particular site was really porn) then go through the proper channels, and make a law explicitly banning it don't try to get private companies to do the work of enforcing arbitary rules.
The balance, according to my limited understanding, is that certain types of activity including porn-adjacent sites have much higher card failure rates, so banning some activity is a way to reduce chargeback costs falling on Stripe's shoulders.
In that case, wouldn't the solution be to charge higher processing fees (possibly much higher) for websites in that category? Why ban them entirely?
Which will the lead to deliberate miscategorization, and more costs to verify claimed categorization, and...
I agree it's bullshit, but it shouldn't only be called out when it affects the right people.
I think one of the effects of the gridlock in US politics is that more and more actual policy is now implemented by circumventing the "normal" lawmaking process: e.g. through executive orders, court decisions or appeals to private companies or citizens.
Whichever side you're on, this can't be a good thing for a democracy.
Forcing companies to do business with everyone creates a ton of wrong incentives as well.
A law banning porn. Woof. Enough has already been written about that one.
Applying common-carrier rules to a particular, already highly-regulated, key industry to commerce is not “fundamentally at odds with the framework of US jurisprudence”.
> It would require changing the Constitution: namely butchering the 1st Amendment.
No, it wouldn’t. Just like it didn’t when we did it to telecoms.
The extent to which I want the government to have access to my day-to-day purchases is another matter, but even that's better than commercial operations where I have no recourse.
If I were to make a trade-off, I would implement many more transparency measures for organizations, not for individuals. If I can see what happens in my local school, municipal government, corporation, university, church, and non-profit, that would cut down on all the corruption I've seen, dramatically. I see no downsides to transparency measures which don't impact individuals, and they have a lot more impact than corporations snooping on me.
Indeed, in one case I saw corruption, corporate snooping meant that the corrupt place had more leverage over a whistleblower. That's no good.
Yes, I do understand the connection between corruption and money laundering. That touches on one form of corruption. There are many others. If I were to eliminate corruption, I'd take measures like:
- Extend laws like FOIA and Open Meetings, dramatically, so we have a much clearer understanding of government. In particular, I'd extend enforcement and penalties. Wilful violations should be criminal.
- Extend such laws to cover non-profits as well. I should be able to ask a church, a university, or any other organization exempt from taxes for documents, or sit in on governance meetings.
- Put in stronger whistleblower protections, and eliminate a lot of the power of NDA / non-disparage / etc agreements
- Increase SEC-mandated transparency measures
... and so on. Those have nothing to do with money laundering, and to me, are strict wins.
Very little of the corruption I've seen involves bags of money. Most corruption involves things like (not directly financial) preferential treatment. If I give you a raise you don't deserve, give your child preferential treatment at my school, or cut a sweet deal for your company, that doesn't show up in a Paypal transaction.
As I said, that's precisely because the world works the way it does, rather than the way you wish it did. The bottleneck for lots of otherwise extremely profitable criminal endeavors is their reliance on traditional financial intermediaries.
> That touches on one form of corruption.
I'm talking about the type of corruption that keeps entire countries from developing economically. I don't know what you're on about. And no, your series of suggestions, which amount to saying make the current regulations stronger, doesn't come close to closing a huge loophole created by giving blanket immunity to financial intermediaries.
Edit: honestly it sounds like you ran into some unfortunate situation somewhere and hold a personal grudge. But that's not a particularly meaningful basis for policy recommendation, especially given that it's quite clear that you don't understand the domain particularly well.
> Most corruption involves things like (not directly financial) preferential treatment. If I give you a raise you don't deserve, give your child preferential treatment at my school, or cut a sweet deal for your company, that doesn't show up in a Paypal transaction.
Most corruption is like this when you live in a country where corruption isn't much of a problem.
I'm done here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680687
No, you can't infer how much someone knows about a topic, at least from the discussion here. You can infer they know something different than you do. That happens when you get a modern-day Republican and Democrat in the same room, and each believes the other to be an idiot. The same happens if people are from different countries, cultures, or hold different values.
Groups develop groupthink, with a common set of information, logic, and conclusions. It's natural to assume anyone who doesn't share those is an idiot. My own experience is that they're often not idiots, and if I go in with an open mind, I often learn something (and quite often, we both do), although that's been harder with recent political polarization. Nowadays, discussions usually shift to people calling me an idiot if I don't line up 100% with their worldview. It's been rarer and rarer to have intelligent discussions.
Perhaps my conclusions were wrong. They often are; on average, we're right about half the time in discussions, and that's fine. Perhaps yours are too. Perhaps we're right in different contexts (we might live in different countries, for example).
However, where you took this discussion, neither of us has any chance of discovering what the other's opinions were informed by. If you doubt something I'm saying, you can ask for evidence, rather than assuming and insulting. Perhaps each of us might have learned something.
In either case, that's as far as I'm willing to take this discussion. I nerd on topics like these for fun. Getting insulted is tiring and draining rather than fun. You're welcome to believe I'm an idiot.
I propose we terminate this discussion. People are welcome to be wrong on the internet.
> If I were to make a list of my top-10 problems, corruption would be near the top. None of the cases I've seen involved money laundering.
rather clearly reveals your lack of understanding of the topic at hand. The fact that you think this has anything to do with political polarization is another clue that you have no idea what you're talking about. Your repeated attempts to anchor all of this to your personal experience are also quite revealing with respect to both your bias and lack of grounding in the subject.
And this isn't about your conclusions being wrong - it's just that you (and people like you) seem to form absurdly strong opinions when you don't even have the slightest clue regarding why things are the way they are.
Btw, since you are now pretending that you were this intellectually eager person just trying to have an honest discussion and I somehow poisoned the exchange, let me remind you that this was your first contribution:
> If I were to list my top 10 problems in life, money laundering would not make the list.
Which, of course, is combative, dismissive and arrogant. Why on earth is your personal list of "top 10 problems in life" relevant to any discussion? Who the hell do you think you are? It's the type of response that immediately signals lack of interest in learning anything, which you have since confirmed.
> I'm done here.
> I propose we terminate this discussion
You can do whatever you want - is your next reply also going to mention how you're really done this time?
And social media? Careful, this position is making you fascism-adjacent. Now is the time to decide if that's really where you want to be.
I know nothing about this industry but I would kind of assume the problem is with the credit card companies themselves (Visa and MasterCard), who are probably concerned with brand safety or some such.