> Wyre Payments, the company’s upstream payment processor, terminated SpankPay’s account because Wyre’s new payment processor, Checkout.com, doesn’t allow processing for payments related to sexual businesses, SpankPay said.
Sounds like it would end the same if they were a "normal" sex work payment platform.
Not that relevant, this happens to a lot of sex-work oriented platforms. Payment processors often discriminate or demand heavy censorship/arbitrary rules from these platforms.
Different industries have different fraud rates and different legal difficulties around the globe. It might not be a good enough reason from your perspective to blanket ban them, but exclusion based on different legal overhead or risk profile is not the same as arbitrary rules or censorship.
Just look at Patreon and their continued stuggle with NSFW artists. I briefly worked on a similar smaller site that allows for artists drawing explicit things, and our payment processor would threaten us weekly to cut us off for arbitrary reasons. The chargeback/fraud rate did not differ based on the user drawing explicit content or not.
The political pressure (on crypto and banking) is also because of fraud. If you are transferring money via a blockchain with no KYC, it's going to be hard to get a legitimate banking partner to be happy with that.
Now when you say 'but it's only going to be used by the sex industry', you're adding another area of high fraud on top. It's hardly surprising that financial companies want nothing to do with two high-risk sectors sandwiched on top of each other.
I wonder if there is anything to the trope, that when the adult video payment eventually shows up on a married couple’s credit card bill, the spouse who signed up for a heftily expensive subscription will claim that their credit card must have been stolen.
Thus they will demand the charge to be reverted and thus, many charges being disputed simply because of people’s prudishness. And then porn site operators have high fraud rates. I wonder if they are also more liable to become victims of card testing.
I don't know if we can say they are more or less likely to be victims of card stealing, but that there are a higher number of reversed charges unquestionably true. Had huge problems with that before ccbill. Even after, there were still a higher than normal number of issues.
I think honest people would concede that there are many, many legit issues around chargebacks. But if it's about money, then just say it's about money and everyone can sit down and go to work on finding methods of reducing chargebacks that actually work.
Allie Eve Knox, a sex worker and advisor to SpankPay.
Knox has been banned from every mainstream payment app available today, including PayPal, Square, Circle, Cashapp, and Venmo, and uses crypto as a way to continue to live and pay the bills.
Sex workers face near-constant deplatforming, loss of income, and instability in their work as a result of discriminatory financial institutions and laws.
In December, Knox and Ameen Soleimani, co-founder of Spankchain, joined adult industry advocacy group The Free Speech Coalition on Congressional visits to discuss financial discrimination against sex workers with legislators.
It's across all payment platforms, it's targeted against sex workers, and they're seeking federal intervention in the US to attain fair access.
> Allie Eve Knox has been banned from every mainstream payment app available today, including PayPal, Square, Circle, Cashapp, and Venmo, and uses crypto as a way to continue to live and pay the bills.
This seeems to cross over from 'we dont want your business' into purposefully targetting and harrasing activists.
Maybe their should be investigation to make sure these provideds aren't conspiring?
This is true in many situations, but setting up full self-maintained payment processing isn't really a feasible option for small or even larger development teams. Payment processing is heavily regulated with many legal requirements, not to mention the countless security threats.
I think the problem was in the gateway to USD. If they only accepted crypto, and paid it out to the sex workers, then it would work. But in the real world your average John has a credit card, not crypto, and your average sex workers can't pay their rent or buy groceries using crypto. The problem was, and always is, the gateways to fiat. And I don't see a solution to that.
There's is no user-friendly solution, but I don't see why it would not be possible to send money to/from a -say- Kraken wallet to a wallet used to buy/sell sexual services from an app. It's just a bit of hassle to transfer.
Not including the on-ramp from fiat to crypto inside the app would solve the issue, I would think.
The first half of paying for the services maybe. But you’ve just pushed the problem of converting from crypto to $DOLLAR to the service provider.
I don’t think Coinbase for example would knowingly allow a prostitute, whose inbound source of tokens is coming from a digital pimping service, to convert them to USD and then ACH the cash to her local bank.
...and then the people who were pissed at Facebook and Twitter went off and made their own Facebook and Twitter because making a website has very little in the way of barriers to entry.
There's whole domains where AI doing it is just infeasible. For all the other domains, who tells the AI what to do? Who knows how to be specific enough and precise enough to get the right output?
Until you have full-on AGI that can talk to stakeholders, gather requirements, build an incremental mental model of what the requirements are, and all that jazz, programmers will have the same job as they do today: tell the computer what to do. It's just that we'll be using a different language to do it in.
I suspect tools like this will become excellent at all the slight variations and duplicate work that goes on in a whole bunch of development work. To the point where especially for the low complexity work you get enough productivity increase that you actually begin to reduce the demand for programmers in general.
I wonder what the proportions work out to be, if you break the work into "the hard bit" vs the "automatable bit", Ive defiantly worked on projects where there is one novel bit that had to be done just right, but 80% of the time was still spent setting up standard databases, payment processors, customer interfaces.
I disagree on the reduce demand part. Companies have no shortage of ideas and products they want to implement. Execution is the limiting factor right now. I fully expect programmer demand to remain constant at first and then increase as new classes of products are made possible because of AI.
BTW, this is what’s happened with every other programmer productivity increase. No company has responded with ‘cool, our product is done’ and instead has expanded what the product can do. Customers then expect more, and the cycle continues.
“AI” has quickly become the new “Cloud”. Will it change things? Absolutely, but it isn’t going to solve every single problem. I fully expect to see articles in the not distant future of the likes of ‘we moved away from AI and it saved money/improved our product/etc…’
It’s entirely consistent for AI-based development tools to only be useful to trained programmers and for those same AI tools to render the programming field as a whole much less tenable of a career.
In fact, the same sentence may be true if you replace AI tools with any technology that improves programmers’ productivity: advanced frameworks for example. The issue is that if programmer productivity shoots through the roof — if you need only one programmer to do the job of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand — then it can result in massive layoffs of programmers. It need not be the case that new technologies be accessible to non-programmers for this to happen.
The same thing is happening in other areas. My friend works in robotic welding. He programs robots to perform specific welds and then supervises them operating during the assembly of each truck chassis. As a single person, he’s doing the work of half a dozen journeyman welders. This amplification of his productivity by technology means his factory needs far fewer welders to get the same work done. It should come as no surprise, then, that older journeymen welders have been very vocal in expressing their hostility towards him throughout his career. “Learn to code” indeed.
Because GPT3/4 manage to write the kind of code I already used automation as much as possible towrite for me, because it's boring and repetitive?
I don't think so.
When ChatGPT can write code to the query: "Hey, the production server acted weird last weekend, could be about that issue we talked about on slack yesterday, could you have a look at that?", then I' going to start worrying about my job security.
Well that's all the info I got thrown in the hallway, so...that's what it has to work with. If I have to do extra legwork for it to function, then it's not a replacement for me, just another tool that helps me up my productivity with.
The barrier of entry is high in the payments market. You have to follow a lot of regulations, get other payment providers to accept you, and most importantly have enough liquidity. If you are missing even a single one of these factors, then you're only playing around with Monopoly money.
Crypto payment processor SpankPay announced on Monday that it would shut down because of financial discrimination
Interesting phrase, "financial discrimination" (and "banking discrimination" later in the article), curious to see it here considering Vice's (and similar media outlets) lack of interest or ra ra attitude to deplatforming when seeing it applied to services and people they disapprove of in the past.
Seems a valid phrase to use though if a platform is powerful and ubiquitous enough to cause existential issues to legal entities it doesn't like or have bad PR.
"It's good when bad things happen to bad people and bad when bad things happen to good people" seems to be a fairly universal sentiment regardless of one's personal stance on who/what good and bad are.
It's not at all universal. It's just much harder for media to be consistent about than individuals, because unless a media outlet has very strict editorial policies, it is comprised of many people with many beliefs and will end up being inconsistent by default. Especially an outlet like Vice, which is entertainment-focused and doesn't make much of an effort to distinguish opinion pieces from reporting. If a "news" site doesn't have a separate tab that says "opinion", you're gonna get opinion all over everything.
More specifically Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, is co-founder of Vice but left Vice in 2008.
According to Wikipedia he has described himself as "a fiscal conservative and libertarian" whereas Wikipedia describes the Proud Boys as "far-right neo-fascist".
Vice doesn't seem to have any political allegiance in terms of US partisan politics but I think it's fair to describe them as socially progressive but otherwise (right) libertarian. They seem to be more "anti-establishment" than left or right.
For what it counts, Vice does have a fairly strict editorial policy, which more or less is "we want David vs. Goliath stories". It becomes very obvious after a while that this is how Vice wants the world to be seen.
Everyone is either "The Man" and therefore evil, or is sticking it to "The Man" and is therefore heroic. I've been friends with people that have been interviewed by Vice - this is the single most annoying thing about them. Most of them are hobbyists (Nintendo-console related, both modding and emulation) who do what they do "because it's cool and fun to do".
Then Vice barges in, interviews them and/or their team members and suddenly the angle under which the coverage is presented becomes how these awesome, super cool hackers are doing it because they want to stick it to the Big Evil Nintendo which is just... not at all the motive. None of those people are/were out to be a David taking up the sword against the Goliath that is Nintendo. They just wanted to tinker with a console because of curiosity.
Vice is (alongside to a lesser degree Kotaku) responsible for basically ruining any conversation about homebrew, console modding and emulation by putting the "it's good to pirate actually" motivation front and center for hacking and modifying consoles. Like... fucking talk to these people. Almost every single one hates having their work associated with piracy since it can cause serious reputational harm (and is often inaccurate to boot), yet Vice doesn't give a single flying shit about that since Nintendo is "The Man" and that means that any action that can be construed as being against them is morally justified.
Probably one of the worst outlets to ever link (and for what it counts, what they cover usually has better coverage elsewhere so... yeah, avoid them if you can). Strongly also recommend to avoid ever talking to them if you can help it, they will slant the conversation to further that editorial policy if they can.
The funniest thing is that they're a _horrible_ employer. I've known a bunch of people who work there: They demand unpaid OT, pay shit, have rampant sexual harassment, and generally act like a 60's marketing company.
They are Goliath, and the random conservative twitter people they write hit pieces on are David.
I was interviewed by some large magazines and some TV stations years back (Germany, topic was Geocaching and Confluencing - we had some firsts, yes! ;-). All of them came with a finished story and were only looking for sound bites.
".. and we can easily tell who is good and who is bad" - is the unsaid part of that sentiment, and the reason why it doesn't really work.
"Sex work" used to be called prostitution and considered morally bad by most people until about 5 minutes ago. That's why principles matter, otherwise you are at the mercy of the mob of people who will decide for you what to think.
Way to miss the point, but okay. Yes, sometimes they would be called strippers. I don't think any of them was necessarily seen as "good" by most people but yes.
I don't think you understand the difference between value judgements of ethics and morality or the fleetingness of history.
Sex work is considered immoral under certain currently dominant religious doctrines. Mind you, even Christianity originally carved out a niche for sex work (Jesus certainly was more kind to those earning their living with sex work than to those earning it by exploiting the poor). Arguably this hangup in the modern day largely stems from Christianity and Islam however, which means it started less than 2000 years.
But morality doesn't tell you much because it literally comes down to religious doctrine, which only works for practitioners of the given faith and can still change over time depending on which interpretation of scripture is taken as canonical (e.g. few Christians getting in a huff over strip clubs would feel equally offended by mixed fabrics). This is why I didn't say "moral people" or "immoral things" but "good people" and "bad things".
Good and bad are value judgments that can be entirely arbitrary, i.e. what I might consider a good person is someone you might consider a bad person. This in turn can be based on a coherent system of ethics you follow or even something entirely inconsistent like most ethical systems that try to incorporate morality even when it conflicts with personal intuitive beliefs (this often leads to feelings of shame and guilt).
Ethics contrary to morality are usually defined in terms of harm and benefit. These terms are again subjective because they hinge on core beliefs, e.g. I think the goal should be for all people to have the ability to live a fulfilling life and not worry about having their basic needs met so my understanding of harm and benefit is defined in terms of whether something contributes to or detracts from that. Many people share core beliefs that are similar enough to be compatible with mine, so our shared system of ethics is "intersubjective" rather than subjective (i.e. entirely up to the individual) or "objective" (i.e. a universal truth claim about the universe).
So is sex work "good" under my system of ethics? No? Yes? Not really? Sex in itself is not inherently harmful so that doesn't make it bad. Transactional exchanges are not ideal but sex work is hardly unique in that. Arguably sex work is exploitative because most sex workers would prefer doing other work if they had the opportunity and weren't suffering from external pressures (often financial ones) but some sex workers genuinely enjoy their work as long as they know they can perform it in a safe environment. But that again isn't inherent in sex work itself but follows from the power/wealth imbalances and exploitation of the kyriarchy (i.e. sexism, capitalism, etc). So an instance of sex work may be bad but the act of performing sex work itself isn't necessarily even when the act of consuming sex work might be.
But speaking of missing the point, remember what I actually said: most people don't like it when bad things happen to good people even if they like it when bad things happen to bad people. "Bad things" in this case refers to circumstances that negatively affect the individual's ability in the above sense. "Bad people" referring to people whose actions negatively affect (everyone) else's ability in that sense.
Personally I think it's best for bad things not to happen to anyone if we can avoid it because enjoying the suffering of others is in itself detrimental to achieving said goals. But some level of schadenfreude seems to be a universal part of the human experience, so I still stand by what I said.
Of course things get messy when your ethics have to account for fairly intricate moral codes with tons of rules that boil down to being justified with "because God says so": good luck trying to incorporate "also you shouldn't wear mixed fabrics" into an ethical system you can apply day-t...
I didn't either, it's a view point you can have it's just a very low moral argument.
"Sex work is ok because I agree with it, and agitating for a fascist society is not, because I disagree with it" - when someone could as easily say "Sex work is bad, because I disagree with it, and agitating for a fascist society is good, because I agree with it". It's a moral standpoint based on your beliefs (My beliefs are right).
You can climb the moral ladder if you base the same argument ("sex" vs. "fascism") on some common ground, E.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
(I would wish that people would not throw "fascist" aka. everyone who disagrees with me, around as easily and read some fascism theory - E.g. Sternhell - before and distingiush it from Dictatorships, Nationalsocialism, Authoritarianism etc.)
"Sex work is fine and fascism is not" remains an incredibly sound moral position sorry. I think you're enjoying these convolutions though so that will be my only contribution to this project!
If nothing works, try ad hominem arguments. It is still an argument, but a very weak (the weakest?) one.
"You are wrong because it's you" has the same problems as "The things I think are ok, are ok, and the things I think are bad, are bad", it doesn't try to be universal and revolves around oneself. Also these kind of arguments have the tendency to lead to an echo chamber with no progress on understanding.
PS: You might be right, I've studied Philosophical Computer Science, but it doesn't strengthen your argument. It's like saying "You're wrong because you wear a blue hat, when I wear a blue hat".
Did I walk into a high school debate club without realizing it? Ad hominem? Let me be completely clear I don't respect you or your position here.
I'm not engaging in an abstract philosophical exercise with the goal of furthering humanity's understanding of morality or whatever it is you think we're doing.
I'm pointing out that spending time and energy trying to formulate perfectly nuanced universalizable mozaics of morality and slotting your positions into them is foolish.
An alternative is just having good judgement, and acting on it. Is that perfect? Can it be generalized to all cases? No! And it doesn't matter because sex workers should be able to get paid without dying and fascism is bad. You don't need that shit today take it to your debate club maybe they'll like it.
I'm not from the US, we don't have high schools here and we don't have debate clubs. And I personally don't care the least about US moral judgements. No one outside the US (96% of the world population) cares about US moral judgements. I still have a trauma because as a kid I was forced to watch sitcoms with only black people and sitcoms with only white people, as if there were two planets (Golden Girls was neat though, Cosby didn't age that well - it was ok to rape women but not ok to kiss someone white on TV - how fu is that). But thanks for assuming. The world doesn't revolve around you, the US is not the center of the world. I know, shocking. Get over it. I'm just happy that the days of US culture imperialism and gun-point morale exports ends and no one is forced to care about your views in the future ("But we have atomic bombs!" Yes, heard that before recently). Iraq and Afghanistan showed the emporer wears no clothes. Sad thing is I probably need to learn Chinese, when the other bully enters the stage (there is always a bully) but at least it's a change + "Wandering Earth" wasn't that bad ... Humming 51st state
It's not sound though. In no objective sense is it sound. On the fascism part I think we can all agree, but every society that's ever existed across the globe has criminalized or at least made sex work taboo for good reason. Do you think your moral authority is greater than the sum total of humans that have existed across all cultures?
Hint: it's not. So the burden of proof is on you.
Why exactly do you think sex work is ok and tolerable in society?
While you're right on the fascist society point, I'm not sure how that is at all relevant in this situation. Do you think any moral bounds on society are fascistic? Do you know what fascism is at all?
I believe it's considered deplatforming when it happens in response to political opinions, and with the expectation that it is in relation to communication media. Banking and other critical services would be extreme cases of deplatforming.
While on the other hand discrimination implies characteristics that a person can't (reasonably be expected to) change, in this case a profession.
But this is about the language used to describe the action, not the action itself. I don't think “being unable to open a bank account” is what most people mean when they say “so-and-so shouldn't be given a platform by the NYT”.
I wish we would be more explicit here. What political beliefs are they being de-platformed for? Is it the lower taxes? Deregulation? Immigration policy? Which specific political belief is getting them kicked off of platforms?
Would it be OK to cut off access to water, electricity and heating for beliefs that some people consider bigoted? Said something wrong on the internet - no more water for you - go dig your own well.
What's the difference between an electricity provider and a banking platform?
You can always stuff your cash in your mattress if you manage to be enough of a bigot that every financial institution decides you're radioactive. Harder to do that with utilities like water and electricity.
It's worth noting that most US jurisdictions have laws that limit how and when utilities, whether managed publicly or privately, can terminate service. A common example is not being able to cut off gas service in the middle of winter, even if the customer is severely behind on payments.
We don't have to worry so much about the slippery slope you describe because we have already established regulatory backstops that consider utilities different from other businesses.
Gay marriage is illegal in my country. What if conservatives get in power and decide to deplatform those who argue for marriage equality? Remember that "your side" won't be in power forever and deplatforming for political reasons creates ugly precedents.
The point of the post you replied to originally is that bigotry is often clothed in the language of politics, and generally that's done by the bigots. It's only politics because the bigots create that relationship as a mask for the bigotry.
It's not deplatforming for political reasons. It's deplatforming bigots.
Those who are against gay marriage say that it does harm to families.
Those who are against abortions say that they are against killing babies. They also argue that those things aren't political opinions.
Currently I'm not afraid to say that gay marriage should be legalised, because the worst that could happen is that some homophobe could insult me with homophobic slurs. But if extra-judicial persecution of political opponents is normalised and encouraged then I sure as hell would keep my mouth shut, because I don't want to lose my job and my bank account.
A business that deplatforms "bigots" today could easily start deplatforming "baby killers" and "family wreckers" tomorrow.
Leaving aside the deliberate misrepresentation in your examples, this unbanking only goes one way. I didn't see Joy Reid losing her current account for all her homophobic blog posts, for instance.
Given that even murderers, rapists and paedophiles get to have bank accounts, I don't think that there is any human opinion for which people should have their banks accounts removed for what they believe.
If the views people espouse are illegal, then punish them via the law.
>>If the views people espouse are illegal, then punish them via the law.
This also goes for their activities.
There is a clear difference between someone saying "I think Terrorist Group X is great" on twitter and someone using their bank account so that Terrorist Group X can buy stuff to make bombs. And even in that latter case, once the person concerned has finished their prison sentence they should still get a bank account so they can live.
On the other hand, I'd consider "deplatforming" as an appropriate term if and only if the action literally removes the platform used for expressing opinion and communication.
E.g. If someone gets kicked off and kept out of some social media platform or gets denied the opportunity to speak at some public event, or interviewers boycott them even when their role normally would get interviewed, gets kicked out of a job which gives them public outreach (e.g. journalism or university) or some venue refuses to rent them facilities for a talk - to me, all of that is deplatforming no matter if it's because of political opinion or innate characteristics like the color of their skin or religion or whatever. If all the media agree to not show or discuss red-haired people, that's obviously deplatforming red-haired people.
And on the opposite side, if someone gets hurt in other ways that don't change "the platform" - their landlord kicks them out, they get fired by an employer that "only" provides money but not a platform for outreach, their customers drop them - all of that isn't deplatforming but ordinary discrimination, again no matter if it's because of political opinion or innate characteristics like the color of their skin or religion or whatever (that would only affect whether that's prohibited discrimination).
Did they announce that they shutdown because of pink elephants? No they announced they are shutting down with "...SpankPay being discriminated against due to the nature of our business...". It makes sense to report it as such when that's what they said
Wyre Payments, the company’s upstream payment
processor, terminated SpankPay’s account because
Wyre’s new payment processor, Checkout.com
doesn’t allow processing for payments related
to sexual businesses
SpankPay, Wyre, Checkoutcom ... How does this all work? What does the person who wants to pay a sex worker via SpankPay do? Do they use their usual Visa credit card or is the process different?
you change the laws in banking so the risk is much lower to financial companies. Sex work intertwined with trafficking and no company wants to take financial risk. Chase is in the headlines for getting sued for facilitating trafficking.
Wyre Payments, the company’s upstream payment
processor, terminated SpankPay’s account because
Wyre’s new payment processor, Checkout.com
doesn’t allow processing for payments related
to sexual businesses
Pornhub and co wasn't using Wyre Payments, nor had their upstream payment processors company change recently to one that doesn't handle sexual businesses.
Well follow the leader then. Porn has always been the biggest industry online, Onlyfans does it, pornhub does it, just follow the leaders and do it right.
PornHub being in troubles times and times again (sure, some of it is 100% their fault, but not all of it) and Onlyfans trying so hard to have a foot on safer business doesn't feel inspiring.
I'm really not sure there is any business doing porn money processing in a way that is safe from getting the rug pulled below them at any moment.
Also PornHub is operated by MindGeek ($460mn revenue in 2021). It's not some niche startup. "Why can't you do it if PornHub can do it" seems disingenious at best given their parent company's market share.
Prostitution is, for the majority of places illegal.
Is a stripper a sex worker (I guess so), but they don't have to avail themselves of this sort of service in most places because their work is legal.
Let's say you live in a place where gambling is illegal. Lets say that you open a blackjack and slots room in your garage. If your local bank manager finds out that the piles of cash you bring in are from an illegal source, they are likely to show you the door because they want nothing to do with you.
Google around and you will find articles from the early days of medical weed, and how hard banking was for those providers! Hell this got resolved but the fact that it happened should make your eyes pop: https://ij.org/press-release/federal-government-will-return-...
> if pornhub and a million other porn sites can operate
All owned by one company, and when the government (or worse, some random quango) says jump, they say how high. Content on the no-no list disappears overnight (e.g. ever wondered why you never see breathplay in online porn?).
I read a cartoon once of two people talking (technically, one person and one teddy bear, but that's not relevant here).
Panel 1:
A: So let's go over this again. If I take a woman out for drinks and dinner, hoping this will influence her decision to have sex with me, this is legal?
B: Correct.
Panel 2:
A: But if instead of taking her out, I offer her the same amount of money in cash form to have sex with me, that's illegal?
B: Correct.
Panel 3:
A: But if I pay a woman to have sex with me, hire a camera crew to film it, and sell the results for profit, that's legal again?
B: Correct.
Panel 4:
A: Sorry, can we go through that one more time?
Also there's a very obvious difference between the 1st one and the 2nd one.
Try telling a random woman, that you matched on Tinder or whatever, that you'll pay for sex. You'd get called a disgusting pervert and blocked. Can you figure out why?
While the feature of these stories are always "independent sex workers" and students struggling to pay their college, the main users of adult payment services are very exploitative businesses that are not owned by the performers, operate in a dirty and unregulated market and are directly responsible for a large part of human trafficking in recent years.
I know it doesn't invalidate the point made and I support the freedom of adult individuals to do whatever they want with consenting parties, but it's an important piece of information to consider for understanding the whole issue. We cannot simply turn a blind eye at the massive damage the porn and prostitution industries are doing to society.
Note that Andrew Tate specific operation was quite small.
That does not reduce the harm inflicted. But also it is worth keeping in mind that having an independent stream of income allows SW in the porn industry to better negotiate good working conditions.
And re going for obscure stuff generating problems. It is already the case and we have good case studies following SESTA/FOSTA..
Making prostitution illegal is what drives a huge part of that human trafficking. With no legal oversight, the pimps have free reign, and when their work is illegal, the prostitutes have no recourse. The dynamics are very similar to drugs, and for both legalization is the best way to reduce harm.
There is a big difference between actions being done in the dark versus actions being done in the open and with full endorsement and legal support.
The purpose of law is to tame commercial activities for protection of its commerce and prosperity. By legalizing something that is a net social harm, giving it guiderails so that it can lead to more stability and profit, you have incentivized that harm to reproduce maliciously. It is like offering subsidies to fossil fuels. No, it is like putting regulations on fossil fuels and giving them legitimacy.
Some industries should stay in the dark unprotected always looking over their shoulder for when they might get caught.
> No, it is like putting regulations on fossil fuels and giving them legitimacy.
We put regulation on fossil fuels as a practical matter of recognizing the reality in which we operate, and the harms that will come to real people if we outlawed it without a viable solution to the rest of the problems that would create.
> Some industries should stay in the dark unprotected always looking over their shoulder for when they might get caught.
This sounds nice, but the practical implications are that already disadvantaged people are further abused and taken advantage of. No one should want that type of system.
Harms come from having a porn industry too. BUT No harm is done by banning that industry.
Disadvantaged people should be not in the porn industry for some wealthy person's self fulfillment. We call that abuse. And the wealthy should be penalized.
To elaborate for people unfamiliar with these situations...
In many countries the work itself is legal, but you find such fun twists as:
"You have to operate using cash because banks won't work with you because its legal in Your City/State but not at a State/Federal/National level above that",
"You're not allowed to register as a business and subject to substantial tax penalties",
"Individuals are allowed to do it, but its illegal for a multiple people to organise and work together as a business",
"Your allowed to do it, but only inside your own property, as its illegal for rented commercial or residential property to knowingly provide you such a premises"
... Generally speaking its more common that you find its a case of "It's legal for you the human individual to get paid to have sex, but... not legal to X, Y, or Z" which is how for every step forward, people in this line of work continue to face persecution. Its also sadly one of the ways this the progress gets made, by wheeling and dealing in politics, so they get the legalising change done, but had to trade away any measures that protect worker rights, or changes to decriminalise working as a business together, or to operate a dedicated premises... there's usually one or more catches left over by all the compromise needed to get any movement on the core issue... and so people look at it and go "what's the problem, its legal isn't it?"... to which the response is "well yes... but..." ... And most people have already tuned out before they finish the word "but".
> Making prostitution illegal is what drives a huge part of that human trafficking.
There is absolutely no empirical evidence for this - as it happens, a live social experiment is taking place in Europe. The trafficking networks in the East kicked into overdrive to supply the needs of the German and Belgian legal or gray brothels.
There is only one policy that works, demand minimization by outlawing payment for sex. This is what Sweden has done and, far from empowering pimps, it has largely solved the issue of trafficking, while the "Legalize it" group of countries saw it explode. The data speaks for itself.
Many of the strongest advocates for this system are former sex workers, who have recognised the abuse they were subjected to during that time and seek to protect others from the same.
No doubt, the sex workers that are not trafficked and exploited see it as bad for business because they are forced to compete harder for a smaller market.
The idea that there exists a human right to purchase sex, i.e, to take advantage of your economic position in order to make use of other people's bodies for personal gratification, and that that's something promoting health, is a probably a soft form of sociopathy.
"Human right" may be a bit extreme, but what about the myriad other ways we "take advantage of [our] economic position to make use of other people's bodies"? Am I a sociopath if I get a massage? A manicure? Hire movers to take my couch down the stairs?
No one should have the right to purchase any arbitrary person for sexual gratification. It should be my right to bodily autonomy, and I should be able to accept money for work that involves my body.
As a carpenter, I can accept money and in exchange, do work that is tough on my body and will have long-term physical effects. I should be able to also accept money in exchange for using my own body for to sexually gratify someone (I'm certainly allowed to do it free).
The right we should have is the right to decide how our body is used, not how we can use the body of someone else.
If someone wants to have sex with you, for any reason other than you defrauding them or threatening to violate their rights, and someone else uses the threat of violence to prevent them from having sex with you, that violates both of your human rights, according to any definition of human rights grounded in bodily autonomy and free association.
> "This is what Sweden has done and, far from empowering pimps, it has largely solved the issue of trafficking"
The (local government) departments that work with helping sex workers should be very glad to hear this since they have been quite overworked since covid. If the issue is largely solved they can move workers away from that and focus on other forms of trafficking.
But I do not believe the claim that Sweden has largely solved the issue of trafficking. Looking at the most recent published information from BRÅ (the government department for research and development within the judicial system), the amount of prostitution has increased significant and reached the highest ever peak last year (https://bra.se/download/18.146acb6517fd55784012735/165580083... page 30). The problem seem to have significant grown and is continuing growing.
Feel free to overlay statistics from Germany or Belgium if you want to provide evidence that their model is somehow worse. The complains I hear from Belgium is mostly about how the housing situation around the red street districts has become too expensive, and that people who lives there are tired of the tourism.
Sweden's "Nordic Model" is absolutely not backed my empirical evidence either. One crucial flaw discovered was that it has simply cut off one primary reporting mechanism for discovering trafficking: the customers!
Now, customers can't admit to having been there at all, and so won't report their perception or what they were explicitly told by the sex worker.
This is ironic as your belief is based on the issue of trafficking being solved because you don't hear the reports or the stats dropped.
> The data speaks for itself.
Hysterical. It should be criminal that even sex work advocates in the US are attempting to recreate Sweden's model based on this flawed view. The unsaid reality is that people just aren't comfortable with how normal the consumers of sex work are, and don't want to find out that it isn't an antisocial "other".
Sex work is a labor rights issue. Sex trafficking is a labor rights issue just like labor trafficking is a labor rights issue. One that has nothing to do with punitive or criminal measures of the laborers or consumers, only the traffickers. Normalizing both the supply and the demand side in conjunction with increased avenues for labor assistance is the most holistic solution.
I think we'll need to define what "human trafficking" means in order to have a productive conversation about it. It doesn't need to be defined the same way for every context, just for the one we're talking about in each case.
So in this particular case, what do you mean by "human trafficking?"
This isn't the real problem for payment processors. The problem for payment processors is fraud and chargebacks. The porn industry is an absolute magnet for attempts at using fake or stolen credit cards, either for just plain theft, or from caught spouse's filing fraud claims when the bill is found, or any other of dozens of similar sorts of issues.
It's a great way to launder money for example: the goods are transient, frequently cross national borders, but are only video streams and pictures, and easily explainable at huge purchase rates.
The problem is that for payment processors, the business simply attracts problems through a myriad of historical social factors which are well beyond their control.
If sex workers where allowed to control their own destiny then the exploitation would decrease. Here you have their payment system shut down, now a woman has to get her money via cash which requires protection. You also have websites that allowed sex workers to vet customers shut down because of fake child porn concerns by conservatives (ironically a big user base of sex work).
the main users of adult payment services are very exploitative businesses that are not owned by the performers, operate in a dirty and unregulated market and are directly responsible for a large part of human trafficking in recent years
And you know that how? Because it's the mantra some interested parties repeat?
Those very exploitative business have a ton of money and can always find ways to launder money. The only ones hurted by these bans are the actual independent sex workers, who cannot afford to find alternatives because <gasp> they are independent so they don't have the resources.
Stop trying to save the world. All your good will will only hurt the small ones.
That's exactly the point, denying them access to a payment system the consumers can easily access, hence, limiting the profit motive and the resulting massive human damage.
By your very limited logic, denying drug traffickers access to the banking system hurts poor coca farmers in Bolivia. Well yes, it does, any policy choice involves compromises.
Stop repeating the mantra. Prostitution has existed for millennia. It's not going to change.
You can help to democratize it (i. e. independent sex workers) or you can help the big bad guys (by denying independent sex workers access to a payment system they can easily access). Using your very limited non-logic, you have decided you want to help the big guys. Congratulations.
When you are in a field where no legitimate actor wants to do business with you, of course there will be crime and exploitation.
If I refuse to serve black customers because they are more likely to be criminals, I am going to get a well deserved anti-discrimination lawsuit. That's because we understand that discriminating against black people will only make the problem worse. But discriminating against sex workers is fine, and indeed, it makes the problem worse.
For other jobs, the government protects its workers. For example, by making sure workshops comply with safety regulations. For sex workers, the law essentially says "you can't open a workshop", which is all but helpful as it just put these "workshops" in the hands of criminals, and leave sex workers with no protection.
>a large part of human trafficking in recent years.
Citation needed. The idea that human trafficking is a thing and that it has been increasing "in recent years" is a delusion. It is not backed up by the criminal processing data. And in fact the special "human trafficking" courts set up in the USA in the 20-teens were shut down a couple years later due to a lack of any cases to process.
Human trafficking being a thing to worry about is entirely a news media infotainment story.
I wouldn't say entirely, but I would agree that the public policy approach is completely misguided.
A general labor rights approach would allow more independents to exist and controlled persons have more reporting options and people to confide in. Node based, like the concept of herd immunity.
What does "human trafficking" even mean in this context? Because I've seen it used to describe facilitating the movement of consenting adults seeking to work in the sex industry.
This is going to increasingly be a problem. We don’t need a National digital currency for there to be control in our finances. As long as everything flows through 3-4 “private” entities, and those entities owe their existence to gov’t bailouts, they’ll be quasi-govt organizations.
It will happen: with national digital currencies the control will happen and as soon there is some real threat, people WILL be cut from the possibilities to make payments!
No, the threat won't need to be anywhere close to real. It will be abused politically against whoever is disagreeing with the government, like it was against the truckers demoing in Canada.
The banking system is actually already weaponized case when stakes are high. In my own nominally democratic country, access to loans for the presidential campaign is already refused by national banks to the party that ranked second the last two times. The leader then had to ask for Russian funding...
Those "protesters" started having their banking denied once they started advocating for overthrowing the government. They were not just protesting, they were planning and requesting the government to be overthrown and guns were found. So at this point, it is possible that yes, the government will take exceptionally high measures to counter an attack against the state.
Tons of people have been protesting about the Canadian government and COVID measures outside of that blockade (up to this day), and their bank account is still fine.
I think that national digital currencies have less risk than the current private providers. While in both cases some people will be (I mean, already are) cut from the possibility to make payments, these aren't the same people and the impact is different.
Government-run payment systems have to have explicit legal grounds to make decisions, and their ability to make discriminatory decisions is curtailed by constitutional requirements for fair and equal treatments. A government-run payment system can and will block payments which are for a purpose which the general society through their elected representatives has decided to be criminal, and if the society changes their mind (as it has on many things) they can legalize that stuff, and it will also become legal in the payment system.
On the other hand, the current privately-run system can (and already does!) block payments which are for a purpose which a few unelected rich dudes have unilaterally decided do be undesirable; and if the society decides to legalize that stuff, they can ignore it as that's their arbitrary private choice and they can't be held accountable.
> the current privately-run system can (and already does!) block payments which are for a purpose which a few unelected rich dudes have unilaterally decided do be undesirable; and if the society decides to legalize that stuff, they can ignore it as that's their arbitrary private choice and they can't be held accountable
People are obsessed eith the idea that censorship can only come from government, they are completely blind to the idea of that rich individuals have agendas and power to advance them.
What's more is that if government run and managed money comes around with this supreme court, you can rest easy knowing you can pay for pretty much anything other than an abortion with it.
> We don’t need a National digital currency for there to be control in our finances.
> everything flows through 3-4 “private” entities
Brilliant separation of concerns isn't it.
-- The government says we can have all the porn we want (1st amendment)
-- The cc processors say "we won't let you pay for it" (google: bill ackman )
Now find me a pollution who wants to pass some sort of pro porn bill to make the CC processors allow for these payments.
European here, sorry if I misunderstood, but I always thought the "free speech" protected by the first amendment only protects your right to e.g. voice your political opinion without being punished for your particular views, not your preferences in porn (or the distribution and even existence of it)? As an extreme counterexample the government banned CSAM and one couldn't weasel their way out of such a case by pleading first amendment, right?
It wasn’t that long ago that porn was banned in the US, and ‘obscene’ material still technically is. It’s generally allowed under a 1st amendment exception.
That's a so complicated case, that it's an increasingly bad example.
CSAM is basically evidence of a crime, so it's treated as such, private entities are pressured to monitor for it, detect it, quarantine it, etc.
Which in some abstract sense is okay. (We have data on rising child abuse, including sexual, also data on rising CSAM on the internet and so on, so some very effective interest groups are trying to "do something".) Now, of course, it might not come as a complete surprise to you here on HN that the pragmatic concerns about the approach, proposals, implementation, lawcraft and whatnot involved are far outweigh even the wildest claims of benefits, the whole enterprise is very counter-productive, at best security-theater, but in reality it's just a fucking public interest disaster (FOSTA/SESTA, basically War on Sex Work, yet another highly acclaimed installment of the War On series!), an in a convenient secondary effect it's a "free moat" for the incumbents.
The obvious legal issue is that it's "impossible" to say what it CSAM and what is something that looks like that. For example, what if, there's a machine that generates pictures that look like CSAM? You might advertise it, but likely in no time the DoJ and a bunch of other federal and state entities would sue (and of course arrest, raid, detain) you arguing that somewhere there's actual CSAM in the process, it's distribution, etc.
And even if simple plain "aliens in a vacuum" reading of the law indicates that eventually the government would lose these cases, it's very realistic that the courts themselves would just make new law that in effect criminalizes this even more victimless version too.
But, all in all, with enough advocacy it's possible, just there are very few people who want to spend their life on this.
If AI generated CSAM is poisoned by actual CSAM in the process, wouldn't that extend to AI generated art being poisoned by copyrighted work in the process?
CSAM is not in violation of the first amendment because the supreme court decided that obscenity isn't protected speech. It isn't specifically that the first amendment only protects political speech, like with abortion, obscenity limitations - particularly related to children - are just something the court made up which no one really openly disagrees with (for obvious reasons).
In a way it shows that the first amendment isn't really all that absolute. Say something that enough powerful people find gross and they'll just make it out to be an unstated exception.
It's worse than that; actual government regulation has oversight, constitutional protections, appeals processes and the like. But by doing it indirectly through the payment system they can sidestep all of that.
My friend, you’re talking to a lawyer who makes his living suing banks for violating consumer rights. Suffice it to say, all of these concerns are very very well Justified.
> As long as everything flows through 3-4 “private” entities, and those entities owe their existence to gov’t bailouts, they’ll be quasi-govt organizations.
You are so fixated on Government, you miss the forest for the trees.
If these 3 organisations are run by similar people with similar agendas, you can have universal censorship.
No need for government. Tyrany has been privatized
Traditionally, legally, when a private businesses monopolizes and aspect of life, they take on some obligations of government, like "town squares" inside shopping malls.
Worse than government organizations. Government organizations have to follow all sorts of pesky rules about what they can do e.g. the first amendment. Corps can do whatever, so the government loves to use them as puppets to do what they want when the rules don't allow them to it themselves e.g. banning porn and banning people talking about the COVID lab leak.
Only issue is that "I want to oppose the Federal Regulators' stated goal of increasing the safety and soundness of your bank"[1] doesn't go over well even in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. It's the new "high-risk".
Democracy in action. Companies are against any support for this kind of industry. And so get pushback from any and all kinds of services. I'm just waiting for some schmuck to argue a human rights argument and force vendors to service them.
That seems like a leap. How do you know who is downvoting or why?
I did not downvote, but my opinion of your comment is at best it doesn't add to the discussion. At worst, it's flame-bait. I mention this only because these are potential reasons for downvote as well.
It's all speculation though, because I too have no knowledge of who is downvoting you and why.
Good counter. I have observed posts with denunciation of porn industry and its relevant activities get downvoted often. Whereas posts that celebrate its freedom and openness, get upvoted, and they all have a left leaning or libertarian bias.
That is where the speculation comes in. My hypothesis: HN crowd is more centered towards innovation and new ideas, and frown upon anything that mimics old regulations. I guess the porn industry is a ground of innovation and new ideas right now.
Not a very helpful comment from my side in terms of proposing a solution for this, but: I bet people complaining against cancel culture will not complain about this.
Here in Europe we don't even have a dispute - it's legal up to a point, and we don't see much benefit to fight over when exactly this point happens. It's usually ok for practical purposes.
I don't disagree. But my conclusion is that cancel culture is nothing new. The novelty is that those that used to get cancelled are now cancelling others.
Definitely not a new thing, it always amazed me that people genuinely believe so, but I bet there are more witch-hunts thanks to the internet than ever and that is what makes it feel like it's a new phenomena. There's more, spreads way faster, always someone new to "cancel" or "protect".
Big parts of the internet are like constant reality tv dramas.
I didn't say pay for and that wasn't a mistake. And the difference is significant and highly relevant to points we're both making so I suggest reconsidering in light of that clarification.
But anyway, I'd say the percentage is way higher than 1 or 2%. Thing is, some men pay with money, some pay being exposed to ads or sharing data.
Also, I don't know why that user finds that paying for porn is bad and "simpish" (hah). If you're OK with porn and enjoy it, how's bad paying for the effort of the performer? It's not like your like you're skipping paying some dollars to a giant like Disney...
Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements. It seems to be more common too.
The other day I got a notification that was "FYI we sold your shares in company X (NASDAQ listed)". They've decided they're no longer keen on weed companies and have taken it upon themselves to fix my portfolio to remove such evilness. Left me slightly speechless...I'm paying you to hold shares not be moral police ffs.
edit: this was a self-managed portfolio hence my surprise at getting notified about successful trade
That's a circular argument though, the label is also a moral judgement
The public was becoming too liberal, didn't have a strong enough reaction to "prostitution" anymore. Hence they started relabeling most voluntary prostitution disingenuously and even changing laws to make clearly "nothing special" also be "sex trafficking" ... like a man traveling for a weekend getaway to another city with two half-sugar baby half-prostitites.
No it’s not. Whatever moral judgement the government assigns to a crime is irrelevant to a company who is staring down the barrel of a lawsuit for being party to said crime.
In the end, all it would take is one case of a pimp accepting payment for his underaged prostitutes via this company for the payment processor to be sued into oblivion, so they made the rational decision to not open themselves to this risk any longer.
Payment processors are really hard to sue unless they are directly involved in fraud. Which is why person to person payment processors like Venmo can operate.
What? No it's not. Here's an example of a payment processor that got sued for being the payment processor used by a debt settlement firm that merely "overcharged consumers, took untimely fees, misrepresented the value of its services, and failed to make critical disclosures about consumer harms."[0]
> Payment processors are really hard to sue unless they are directly involved in fraud.
All of that is merely a question of the scale of the activity and how badly the government wants to stop it. Same reason cryptocurrency escaped taxing/reporting requirements for many years -- the scale and the ire of the government just wasn't there yet.
Relevant to this discussion, the payment processor in question is associated with a company that makes no bones about providing services for people engaged in work that is illegal in many jurisdictions! If you don't think that would eventually land both companies in the government's crosshairs, I don't know what to tell you. Take "fair" out of the equation, if you're a business owner it's not about "fair", it's about saving your ass. It's not a moral judgement for a company to voluntarily disassociate themselves from another company engaged in illegal behavior.
> Which is why person to person payment processors like Venmo can operate.
Venmo's TOS has named restrictions on what customers can do (and "at our discretion" clauses), and they absolutely will ban users for violating them if it either Venmo can prove it or if they government starts threatening them over it.
IIRC, last time something like this was discussed, the problem of fraudulent chargebacks was brought up as the main reason why these banking institutions keep targetting porn and sex work
The B-1 was the original “put a piece in each congressional district” back in the Reagan era.
The issue for gambling and sex payment processors is that they are easy targets for politicians looking for votes: someone who hates them will vote for such a candidate and few will bother to come out in support. Those politicians become the regulators, so in exchange for chilling on some issue or another the payment processors agree to “crack down”
I can't find a source for this (or the B-1 claim) right now so I might be wrong, but I believe the Space Shuttle was done in a similar matter, with subcontractors in each of the 50 states to make it politically bullet proof.
It was widely reported at the time (and Rockwell was proud of their approach) because it was a novel and cynical idea. Even though Reagan had been elected people back then were still shocked by a cynical approach like that.
I was surprised by it. Literally every congressional district, not just every state.
I thought the plane was cool, but even as a teen I could see that it was pointless.
I believe there's some disagreement if the Space Shuttle was intentionally built that way (though the eventual reality came close, but it may have been as much pragmatism and the usual procedures of government bid contracts), but it is definitely a common criticism of how Nasa's current Space Launch System (SLS) was planned and is being built. (It's a criticism also heavily negatively used when comparing, for instance, SpaceX projects over the same timeframes, especially by the sorts of people that think today's Nasa should be more in the business of buying and "leasing" commercialized rockets and capsules rather than building its own.)
This is why I oppose ESG. It’s being pushed by the financial institutions under the guise of sustainability. But now you have many things unrelated to climate that have been show-horned in.
It’s fine to create regulation that’s voted upon, it’s not okay to use financial firms to push moral or societal change in collusion with governments.
Why is this being downvoted if the fact is true? There are so many other high ESG scores like SVB and FTX and even countries like Sri Lanka (went bankrupt as well) that it has become an indicator like Jim Cramer. Every rating system will be gamed if there are incentives for it and be turned into a farce. Just like bombing countries to the stone ages for “human rights”, “liberation” and “democracy”. All code words for genocide and massacres.
The British Empire, a “democracy”, used to invade countries for slave trading. Then when slavery was made illegal it then invaded countries under the guise of stopping slavery!
ESG as a concept is fucked. Creating a scale for each of E, S or G is challenging. Adding a mixing methodology on top is insane. How many tonnes of carbon is a separate CEO/chairmanship worth? Is child labor four or five times worse than super-voting stock?
Is it a moral judgement? Or is it an extremely high number of chargebacks making it unprofitable?
I don’t think payment processors care, but they have margins they want to maintain. Dipping their margins for particular companies or industries would be making a moral decision.
For your mutual fund, I expect similar in that weed stocks aren’t performing as well as they once were and aren’t projected to perform as well so they no longer fit the targets of your fund. I’d read the prospectus before assuming some moral aversion to weed.
I have a buddy that used to own a brothel in Arizona. He said he got a lot of chargebacks, but he would dispute them with the physical signatures and generally won.
I'm surprised that such a person was willing to create such an extensive paper trail for their crimes, and that their customers were willing to go along with it too. If I were trying to hire a prostitute and the matter of my signature on a contract came up, I would conclude it was a police sting and GTFO.
Then again I don't hire prostitutes in the first place. I suppose those that do probably have a higher tolerance for criminal risk.
It's the same thing. Payment processors often ban sex-related businesses not out of prudishness or brand risk but simple financial risk controls.
The evidence on this is readily available via Google. Just search for high risk industries for payment processors, it will always include sex industry stuff.
I think the chargeback scenario here isn't cards which are actually stolen. It's that someone makes a purchase, their spouse notices it on the credit card statement, and they deny it.
Then in order to sell the lie to their spouse, they call the credit card company and say, "Of course I didn't make those purchases! I would never do such a thing! I'm not some kind of pervert! Remove these charges immediately or I'll close my account!"
And then the credit card company's thought process is like, "Well, you probably did! But we can pretend you didn't, if that's what it takes to keep you as a customer so we can keep making money off you."
I have a 0% chargeback rate. I am banned from every US and EU retail bank, brokerage (both crypto and equities), and SEPA, on the basis of my 1st amendment protected behavior. The sites that got me this status are donations-only -- nobody has any incentive to chargeback, we aren't offering merchandise or subscriptions. People who give us money just generally want to give us money. Similar anti-immigration, anti-government, and pro-gun businesses (3d printed firearm toolchain companies have had a hell of a time staying banked) also have very low chargeback rates, lower than the industry average.
Financial institutions should not be allowed to discriminate against law abiding citizens. If a transaction is legal it should be their job to move the money from party A to party B.
Just for the record, your "first amendment protected behavior" means the government can't prosecute you for said behavior. It doesn't mean anyone else has to tolerate you or your nonsense, including major financial organizations. Or are you saying you want that ebil gummint to impose your will on others?
It is absolutely reasonable to expect that freedom of speech involves the preservation of being able to make basic purchases.
This "freedom of speech isn't freedom of consequences" line is exactly the sort of attitude people take in the countries in which the government does suppress free speech, and they think it's just perfectly fine. You have freedom of speech and every country then, the consequences just going to jail.
There's a limit to this. There should be consequences for you saying things that are wrong, lying to people, spreading hatred, and so on. However, protecting basic human decency in the ability to continue to participate in society is incredibly important to preserving free expression across our nations.
Being able to purchase things, being able to post to the internet, are both aspects of this. It's fine to have this attitude when they're is a strong diversity of companies that allow you to participate and is likely that not all of them can collude with each other.
We have two payment processing companies. Four social media companies, and those four all literally live in the same city.
The patj you tread is a path leading to suppression of speech, and the point of free speech is to ensure that people are able to speak without fear of undue consequence.
> This "freedom of speech isn't freedom of consequences" line is exactly the sort of attitude people take in the countries in which the government does suppress free speech, and they think it's just perfectly fine. You have freedom of speech and every country then, the consequences just going to jail.
There is even old communist-era joke about that:
Is here in USSR the same freedom of speech like in western countries?
Yes, there is freedom of speech, but in western countries there is also freedom after speech.
The first amendment recognizes a natural right, it doesn’t create it. Granted, its protection of that right is limited, but the right still exists even when it is not legally protected.
There is no such thing as a natural right, other than the fact that the strong are able to enforce their will on the weak. Everything else is just things we, as a society, believe are important for everyone to have. And we generally band together to enforce that people _do_ have those rights; effectively increasing our strength to enforce our will anyone that disagrees. That's a good thing, and it's kind of _why_ society exists. But the fact that our society values a right doesn't make it "innate to the universe" in any way. Rights are "discovered", they are "defined and desired".
That's not how Lockean ethics sees it, and if results are what we care about they're a pretty effective worldview to hold - assuming we want a free and prosperous society.
Every time someone mentions that what they are doing is protected free speech, there is someone on HN that feels necessary to make "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences" as an argument.
Sure, at it's most simplistic this is true. However, if exercising a right results in you being homeless when your behavior was legal, and protected as a matter of course by the law, then there is something wrong.
What you are missing, and what everyone who makes this argument is missing, is that Freedom of Speech isn't /just/ a law, it's also a social more, and that social more has shifted, which means speech is now a universally dangerous behavior, regardless of whether or not you will be prosecuted. This isn't just a collective decision of society, it's a consequence of our more interconnected world, the concentration of wealth and power, and how that wealth and power unequally is applied to people based on whether or not they're liked by the wealthy and powerful.
Multi-national corporations, that literally hold charters to sit on the boards of central banks, that are deeply interconnected with the US government, while actively extra-governmentally, do not get to go "muh consequences" when they penalize citizens in life-altering ways for doing legal activities. Banking isn't exactly a right, but you should not be stripped of your ability to bank for doing completely legal things. Being forced to be unbanked, being unable to take payment for your work, and/or being fired from your job are not "muh consequences", they are an attempt by the wealthy and the powerful to utterly suppress speech they don't like, and to oppress the people, the individuals, who dare to utter, write, or share things they disapprove of. In many ways, these are more material than government action.
Anytime someone tells me they care about marginalized communities while also trotting out "muh consequences" has told me that they don't care about marginalized communities. When making this argument you always envision somebody on Twitter you enjoyed being part of the mob to pillory, but those aren't the people who suffer "muh consequences" the most, it's always people at the margins. It's the lady who is forcibly unbanked because she became an online sex worker to pay for her insulin. It's the guy who turned his life around in the legal weed industry, but has to deal with cash accounting and risk of robbery, and is unable to access retirement services, because he's forcibly unbanked. It's the person who runs the local community center but had felonies, and has unsavory prison tattoos they keep covered up, that's forcibly unbanked. Your "muh consequences" destroy people's lives, people who are just trying to survive, and doing so by participating in legal activities in their own communities, and by saying, writing, and sharing things which are legally protected.
You can always justify "muh consequences" when you create a boogeyman to target it at, but the reality is that free speech that is not free from life-altering consequences meted out by global institutions with near unlimited power /isn't free/. Freedom of association for businesses stops when the business is nearly more powerful (or maybe actually is more powerful) than the government. It's still oppression and it's still immoral, even if it's not the government doing it.
> Anytime someone tells me they care about marginalized communities while also trotting out "muh consequences" has told me that they don't care about marginalized communities.
It is also true that there exists behaviors that are unacceptable, socially.. but that should not be illegal. I can lie all I want in most cases, legally, but there are social repercussions for that. I can treat people disrespectfully, but it might cause them to no longer interact with me.
There absolutely MUST be cases where actions have social repercussions, but are not actually illegal.
That being said, I totally agree that freedom of speech is a social construct that goes beyond just the law. And the impacts on someone for their speech has grown more and more out of hand over time.
> There absolutely MUST be cases where actions have social repercussions, but are not actually illegal.
Absolutely. Social repercussions are not the only consequences however, and the "muh consequences" crowd conflates social repercussions (I didn't get invited to the party) with material life repercussions (I had my bank account closed). These are not the same.
Individuals have a right of free association. Small businesses arguably have a right of free association as well. Massive multi-national corporations do not and should not, they are allowed by society their size and breadth so that they serve the needs of society, which includes providing services to every member of the public. You should not be deprived of necessary services for a normal life because of behaving in a legal manner and exercising a legal right.
> Social repercussions are not the only consequences however, and the "muh consequences" crowd conflates social repercussions (I didn't get invited to the party) with material life repercussions (I had my bank account closed). These are not the same.
> Small businesses arguably have a right of free association as well. Massive multi-national corporations do not and should not
So, Joe's corner pharmacy should be allowed to kick someone out of their store who's protesting, acting unpleasant, wearing a KKK outfit, or other First Amendment protected activities, but Walgreens shouldn't be able to? Where do you draw the line?
Arguably, there are likely some services in which you should be obligated to provide to the public regardless as a public service. Pharmacies seem like they'd fall into this bucket. That said, let's entertain your scenario... yes. Joe's Corner Pharmacy is not the only pharmacy wherever it happens to be (mostly because there's very few independent pharmacies left in the US), but Walgreens and CVS may be the ONLY pharmacies in an entire major metro that aren't inside of a hospital.
Walgreen's and CVS as a consequence of their duopoly/monopoly position do not have the right to kick you out of their pharmacy and prevent you from getting the medication you need to sustain your life (possibly quite literally) because they don't like the racist slogan on your t-shirt.
If you don't agree with this, you don't agree with freedom of speech, and any further conversation is basically pointless. You don't get to kill people by proxy or make people homeless by proxy because your don't like what they say as long as you can proxy it out so it's not the government literally directly doing it. It's just as unethical as the government warrantlessly wiretapping all Americans by buying data from data brokers hoovered up by FaceGoog, rather than building said system itself directly to skirt the laws.
The Constitution was conceived at a time when the government was the most powerful entity. Modern multi-national megacorps are arguably more powerful, and should be reigned in with similar restrictions.
Since I've entertained your scenario, in your reply to me, I'd expect an acknowledgement that preventing someone access to medication required to sustain their life, due to their speech, is effectively equivalent to killing that person due to their speech. You cannot have "freedom of speech" in a society where you can legally kill people because of their speech.
There's a huge gap between "social consequences" and material life consequences, and this is why "muh consequences" is a disingenuous argument made by people who actually are opposed to freedom of speech, but don't have the balls to say it (ironically, because they have the right to do so, but are afraid of the consequences).
I purposely picked a pharmacy because it's a more difficult discussion than, say, a sports equipment store. There's no easy answer. Ideally, for things that are life-and-death there would exist a government provider that anyone could go to. We should not be relying on the grace and invitation of corporations for life-and-death needs.
Blanket rules and arbitrary size limits won't work. If you have a blanket rule that companies can kick people out for any[1] reason, then you have your "only one pharmacy in town" problem. If you have a blanket rule that companies must serve everyone regardless of their speech/behavior, then you can't kick a disruptive customer out of your business. If you say life-or-death companies must serve everyone, then you get into the endless debate about what counts as a life-or-death company. We have to eat. Do grocery stores count? Restaurants? We spent 2020 agonizing over what counts as an Essential Business. If you say companies over a certain size (or monopolies) must serve everyone, then you have to set an arbitrary size and debate over whether company X is a monopoly. I don't know what the answer is.
Speech discrimination is just another form of discrimination, and whether you can compel an individual acting as a sole proprietor or a family business to do something is a different question than whether you can compel a multi-national megacorp to do something. I don't know that "20 employees" is the line to draw, but it should be obvious on its face that a small business and an MNC are not the same, and they operate in society under different reasonable standards.
The difference between excluding people from payment processing and physical private property is that payments is clearly an oligopoly for which no viable alternative exists. Treating monopolistic industries that provide essential services differently from competitive ones like drug stores is not a new concept. I would argue the difference should be based on the industry, not the size of a given company.
If 4 companies owned 100% of the property and in a region (as Visa/Mastercard/Discover/Amex do in the credit card industry) and worked together to limit the rights of people they disagree with to protest, you'd have a better point. That's clearly not the case. When you kick someone out of a store, they have the ability to protest anywhere else, and those are very real alternatives. I can grant you that that still limits the protester's speech to a small degree, but the ability to easily protest in many other ways mitigates the harm of that limitation. By contrast, people that are locked out of payments platforms have no alternative.
Similarly, if Walgreen's and CVS had a total oligopoly on pharmacies and colluded to exclude people based on political views, that would be a strong argument to regulate them.
Similarly, I'm not "harmed" as a Stripe user when an OnlyFans model or someone whose politics Stripe's executives disagree with receiving payments through the same platform. If there is a higher objective economic cost, pass that on through fees and stop trying to force the moral views of a few tech executives on everyone in the country.
> the "muh consequences" crowd conflates social repercussions (I didn't get invited to the party) with material life repercussions (I had my bank account closed). These are not the same.
They are the same, they merely vary in degree. If my neighbor walks up to me and asks for a loan of $1000 and I say no because my neighbor regularly calls my wife a whore, there are certainly material repercussions to not having access to that $1000 (maybe he really needs it) but it is clearly a social repercussion of his actions. I don't think I should be legally required to give him $1000. Likewise if someone walks into a restaurant and starts shouting "this food is the worst I've ever ate" it should be perfectly legal for the restaurant to refuse to serve food to this person, even though being denied food is perhaps one of the most severe material repercussions one could experience depending on what other options were available. Other people do not know nor are obliged to know your circumstances and what you need. It is your personal responsibility to make sure your needs are met, which includes making sure at least some portion of society tolerates you. If you piss off one bank, bank with someone else; if you piss off every bank, you screwed up.
> If you piss off one bank, bank with someone else; if you piss off every bank, you screwed up.
Everything is a matter of degree, that's not a counter-argument. The issue here is that "social consequences" are a matter of individual relationships, material life consequences are generally a matter of policy. If you find yourself afoul of a banking policy that banks as a group have chosen to take to discriminate against you for lawful speech, you find yourself having material life-altering consequences for your speech.
You are imaging a scenario in which someone is unbanked because one bank rejected them, when in fact the lived reality of the unbanked in the US is that they are unbanked because /all banks/ reject them, or at least all banks they have access to in their community. And it's not as if they've taken specific and directed actions against those banks, in many cases it can be as simple as having priors, which makes it both harder to get and maintain employment, as well as harder to impossible to get banking services. Nearly 10% of the American adult population has prior felony convictions, but once you serve your time it is morally reprehensible to mark you with a scarlet letter that prevents you from getting basic services required to exist in society, like banking.
So sure, someone screws up? Do we damn them forever for screwing up? Is MERE SPEECH enough to damn someone forever? Because that's what we're talking about here. That's the "muh consequences" argument you're making by implication, even if not explicitly.
The way you imagine "consequences" working, is not how it actually works. Your delusion is not reality, and reality is a harsh mistress. We are accountable for the arguments we make and the policy positions we espouse to their actual reality, not to our imagined outcomes.
Be brave enough to just say that you don't believe in freedom of speech, and that you're okay if 10-20% of the population ekes out an abject miserable existence or dies due to their belief system or utterances, because that's the reality of "muh consequences".
Again, there is no line between individual relationships and life altering consequences. You piss off the love of your life, you lose your spouse. You piss off the dean of your college, you lose a chance at an education. You piss off your boss, you get blacklisted from a company. Actions have consequences and part of your freedom is that you have the option to screw up your life.
Freedom of speech means you're not going to go to jail for what you believe in, you're not going to be fined, no one can legally beat you or invade your home or do anything else to you that they are not allowed to do to everybody.
But the idea that a bank has an obligation to you just because you really need a bank is absurd. If I believe you to be damned forever because you looked at me funny, the government has no right to force me to believe otherwise, because that's what freedom of belief really means. I'm sorry that you live in a real world where being ostracized from society is extremely undesirable, but maybe consider doing things that don't get you ostracized from society. Alternatively, go live alone in the woods. Those are the options we all have.
If you think people should be compelled to endorse the speech of others, then just admit you don't believe in freedom of speech.
> If you think people should be compelled to endorse the speech of others, then just admit you don't believe in freedom of speech.
Offering a public service does not constitute endorsement of the speech of others. Effectively banning people from a public service as a matter of policy is not about individual relationships and is materially different than the situations you describe.
The only reason the line of reasoning you're putting forth is under discussions is that right-wing christo-fascists almost got Pornhub and OnlyFans knocked off the Internet by putting pressure on Visa and their banking partners.
If you are unable to understand the difference between an individual choosing not to associate with you due to disagreeing with your speech vs being banned from a public service necessary for existence in our society due to some people disagreeing with your speech and manipulating policy, I don't know how to help you.
You continue to conflate two things that are not the same. Yes, public services should be compelled to not discriminate against people because they exercise their legal rights. This is a pretty straightforward argument and you doing a lot of mental contortions to not address my actual argument. Thanks, though, for confirming you're okay for up to 20% of the population to die because they said something you disagreed with.
For some reason all the banks or tech companies seem to have the same morals, and as soon as one acts so do the others. so you can't just go from one bank to another.
Once twitter banned trump, suddenly so did all the other tech giants. Once visa banned Wikileaks so did Mastercard. These giant corporations typically act in a block.
So you're in favor of government force as long as it's government force you approve of. You're in favor of the big ebil gummint deciding who banks must have as customers. It would seem that the free market you free speech absolutists seem so enamored of would correct for that and cause a bank/credit card processor to be formed to service your needs. That it hasn't happened would seem to speak volumes about not merely the social acceptability of your actions but also the market's acceptance thereof.
And you still can't shout fire in a crowded theater.
I'm in favor of combating oppression, in all of its forms, especially oppression enacted by elites against marginalized communities. The government is not the only entity that can oppress, and a government by the people and for the people /absolutely/ should act to protect the rights of the citizens, including their right to free speech.
You responded like I'm making a Libertarian argument here, but it sounds like you're embracing the dystopian cyberpunk future where Megacorps control the world and can arbitrarily destroy people's lives for things they say, so I'm not really sure you have a grasp on my politics. I don't know what your politics are, but I know that you hate people who say things you disagree with, because you are completely fine with their oppression, up to and including loss of materially necessary services for living their life. Killing people by proxy for uttering something is not supporting freedom of speech, so maybe rather than being snarky and making disingenuous statements you can just come out and admit you directly oppose freedom of speech so we can have a real conversation?
Money is inherently interconnected with government. It is the government that issues money. It is government that demand that taxes is paid using their money. It is government that issue regulations for finance, and it is government that enforce laws that protect money and the processes around money. It is governments that generally insures banks.
I am perfectly fine with banks being exempted from first amendment rules if the bank has no relation with governments and when the government do not depend on banks to operate the financial system within the nation. Otherwise the bank is just an extension of the government, indistinguishable from a government department.
This is the basic tactic of fascism - government power circumvents the freedom guaranteed by the open market, corporate power circumvents the freedom guaranteed by the constitution.
It may be necessary to revisit the fascist question - we certainly seem to be revisiting the socialist one so horseshoe theory pretty much guarantees we will - but I will not entertain any fascist positions unless the person arguing for it acknowledging that that's what they're doing.
Not really. The SPLC now just exists to bilk coastal liberals, who think that anyone who ever had a Trump yard sign is a 'domestic terrorist,' out of money.
Just in case anyone's not aware, this is the account of notorious hacker-cum-racist Weev, an actual, honest-to-goodness, self-admitted neo-nazi, who emerged from jail with a massive swastika tattoo on his chest.
I'll be playing the world's smallest violin for you tonight.
@dang I don't know why you haven't banned this piece of human waste.
edit: I've been flagged for this and yet - the actual neo nazi who supported Anders Breivik killing children continues to post. Is it the official position of Y Combinator that neo nazis who support terrorism are welcome to post here?
Those who are quick to defend neo-nazis, white supremacists, neo-confederates, anti-semites, and the like seem to be welcome here. Why would you think the subjects of that defense wouldn't be as well?
That’s interesting. I’ve never encountered a brokerage that restricted what shares I could buy. Usually it’s if the share is traded on an exchange it’s fair game.
Technically you could just charge higher transaction fees and require additional validation, like a phone call to the card holder to confirm the purchase to reduce charge backs and maintain the margin. As providers continue to drop out, your transaction fee could increase to create a higher margin.
Technically they have different product lines for everything. I think it’s a situation where it’s possible but not profitable so they don’t do it.
What you’re describing is a lot of work, when there are higher margins elsewhere. Why would a payment processor build a special system just for porn? If it’s profitable someone will eventually create a product.
My assumption is that they looked into this and decided it wasn’t worth it.
I remember years ago the issue of chargebacks is due to shame and people in relationships denying that they ever did it to appease partners. So it’s pretty hard to be in a business that has to fix shame and relationship problems to succeed. If they could do that, they need to release it as a psychology tool.
"Why would a payment processor build a special system just for porn?"
But you don't. You just have to extend the current system for calls about hitting a limit, fraud, etc.
"So it’s pretty hard to be in a business that has to fix shame and relationship problems to succeed."
You don't have to fix shame. You just need to pre-approve the transaction so they can't later charge back without a compelling argument for why the person on the phone wasn't really you.
The reason they do this is the same reason why visa and MasterCard cut off all ties with these types of companies. The reason is that if they continue to be "complicit" they run the risk of having the federal government attack them legally because of their ongoing involvement and controlled substances.
Many consider speech and unfiltered internet access basic rights. But we rarely hear people talk about the right to financial services. Having no way to make transactions and receive payments can bankrupt someone. And they don't just unbank people for moral reasons, there is a long list of individuals, activist groups and companies that have been shut out for political reasons too.
In the current system banks as private businesses can refuse service to whoever they want. We don't own even our dollars in the bank, we're a creditors. If the bank fails anything that's uninsured may be lost, because the vast majority is not held in legal tender, it's book money which no other party will accept as payment.
Your story seems extreme, that would not be legal in my country because stocks are your own property, the bank can't touch them. Either way, none of this should be allowed in the first place. The financial system is completely messed up and the only reason people think it's normal is because they don't know any other way. Money itself should be neutral, it should not be controlled by any single group and people should have free access to basic transactions.
If only there were something like a public bank ledger that belongs to everyone...
> Feels like proper legislation might also be a solution to the human problem, rather than just throwing technology at things. Maybe both?
Possible compromise:
We try the decentralized public ledger. Then, should that fail, we can still attempt to legislate morality for the... well, darn- I've lost count of the failed attempts but maybe it will work next time.
Motherfucker, the entire crypto industry is in the middle of a collapse. It lasted less than a decade at scale and that’s just the 10% that weren’t an out and out scam (I lean toward that number being closer to 0%, but I’ll throw you a bone since you sound like you’re caught up in it).
> Motherfucker, the entire crypto industry is in the middle of a collapse. It lasted less than a decade at scale and that’s just the 10% that weren’t an out and out scam (I lean toward that number being closer to 0%, but I’ll throw you a bone since you sound like you’re caught up in it).
1) Stick to overcollateralized stablecoins (MAI, DAI, FRAX, sUSD, sEUR, etc.) & Layer 2s (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync). If you're okay with the centralization risks, then USDC & fiat-backed stablecoins can enter into the picture.
2) Account abstraction's an important step in providing the necessary security & recovery features to make it easier to use & secure. One of the parts required was ERC-4337, which has been in the works for some time and was recently publicly announced.
Before the contrarians come in for the quick gotcha and say that it bring in centralization: That's been made painfully aware multiple times over. However, Vitalik's 2021 post on social recovery wallets puts it best:
> One common response to suggestions to use any form of multisig, social recovery or otherwise, is the idea that this solution goes back to "trusting people", and so is a betrayal of the values of the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. While I understand why one may think this at first glance, I would argue that this criticism stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what crypto should be about.
> To me, the goal of crypto was never to remove the need for all trust. *Rather, the goal of crypto is to give people access to cryptographic and economic building blocks that give people more choice in whom to trust, and furthermore allow people to build more constrained forms of trust*: giving someone the power to do some things on your behalf without giving them the power to do everything. Viewed in this way, *multisig and social recovery are a perfect expression of this principle*: each participant has some influence over the ability to accept or reject transactions, but no one can move funds unilaterally. This more complex logic allows for a setup far more secure than what would be possible if there had to be one person or key that unilaterally controlled the funds.
I’m sure this is true and can be attributed to DST, but do we know if this would be worse than traffic fatalities caused by commuting in the dark during winter months without DST?
Interesting question. One would have to first account for changes in light conditions in the morning, and then changes in light conditions in the evening.
I mean, they did, last year, and we're done changing clocks now, at least in the US, after this last change. At least until what happened last time we tried this (in the 70s) happens, and kids start getting hit by cars while going to the bus in the dark all winter long. Though perhaps the glow of their phones will save them this time around.
There's a difference in many US brokerages between having your stocks held in your name versus having them held in "street name" (i.e., in the brokerage's name).
GP could probably purchase the shares and be issued stock certificates that they could physically own, in which case there would be no chance of a brokerage being able to sell them.
(I'm not disagreeing that the brokerage's action was sucky, mind you)
If you research how companies are actually incorporated, shares are created, and then listed them it's basically just two tiny companies that exist solely to hold shares. They actually own basically all the publicly traded shares in the US, plus a bunch of non publicly traded ones.
You legally can hold shares of any company, but you'd have to spend insane amounts of money. Even when companies are acquired the shares aren't actually transferred to the acquirer. One of the custodial companies just merges the shares into the acquirer.
Almost all shares are held in street name, but as a shareholder you have the option of either having the shares registered directly in your name through the company or their transfer agent or to be issued physical stock certificates (usually for a fee).
As an example, I used to own a couple of shares of both Apple and IBM. My shares were held directly in my name by computershare, which is the transfer agent for both companies.
When I sold them, someone _probably_ bought them through a brokerage, which means that computer share updated the registration to name Cede & co as the registered owner of the stock, and cede updated an entry indicating that the buyers brokerage owned the shares, and the buyers brokerage updated an entry that said that the buyer owned the shares.
> There's a difference in many US brokerages between having your stocks held in your name versus having them held in "street name" (i.e., in the brokerage's name).
This is irrelevant - a US brokerage cannot arbitrarily trade your shares, whether or not your shares are held in street name.
> GP could probably purchase the shares and be issued stock certificates that they could physically own, in which case there would be no chance of a brokerage being able to sell them.
This is equivalent to suggesting someone put their cash in a mattress rather than using a bank. The real solution is to find a better bank.
> This is irrelevant - a US brokerage cannot arbitrarily trade your shares, whether or not your shares are held in street name.
Indeed. It seems most people think the Hypothecation agreement on a Margin account is something brokerages can do without having such an agreement on file. They can't.
There's much ado made over street name vs your name, but the reason margin and hypothecation agreements are so long and you need to sign them to open a margin account is so they can even take steps such as lending out your shares, because unless you have, they can't actually touch them, per your agreements with a cash account. Street name is primarily so that when you go to sell they don't have to go find YOUR shares (adding time and cost) to sell, but can simply find shares of the particular stock that you have in your account which they have a quantity on, to sell. Basically, it maintains fungibility to streamline the process.
But you're right, if you care to not trust that, you do have the ability to either get certificates (if they're issued for the stock in question) or do a direct registration (DRS) so they're held directly in digital form at the Transfer Agent. Just of course bear in mind that if you're NOT intent on holding these shares forever, selling at this point can become a multi-day process, so you become a bit less able to react quickly to market activity.
The illegal sex industry is a big one, and if you have a scalable and available online platform that illegal transactions can be hidden from the authorities that is a problem.
It is a problem if your payment processor is taking payments for nonconsensual sex, rape and payments to have sex with children. Not just a moral panic issue.
Edit: seems like I have some views that are unpopular with the cowards who downvote comments without engaging in discussion.
> Edit: seems like I have some views that are unpopular with the cowards who downvote comments without engaging in discussion.
Downvotes are to be expected on that topic as soon as one says something mildly against the prostitution "business"...
"Sex consumers" don't want to take responsibility for the damages they cause or the crimes they participate in, for them it's a "simple commercial transaction" between "consenting adults", forgetting all the coercive tactics pimps have been using for ages, the grooming, the drug addiction...
Of course it's a legal risk for any payment processor involved in that kind of "business".
Don't worry about the downvotes, your arguments are completely reasonable and nobody can silence you no matter how hard they try.
I'm not worried about downvotes, I just want the cowards to understands there is a difference between supporting the industry of people that agree to work in it, and people (sometimes children) who are manipulated, and forced with violence and drug addiction to do things they don't want to.
There are sex slaves in America, and anyone that covers for that is worse than a coward.
>Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements
That ship has long sailed, my friend. We spent the past 7-10 years intentionally drawing corporate America into politics. I mean, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter. Apparently people want it this way, so here we are. This time it's a left-leaning cause that gets screwed.
I think these kind of shenanigans are byproducts of how regulation in financial services is delivered from the regulating bodies to builders in the space. As opposed to e.g. health where clear guidelines are often the norm, fintech is basically a shit show where regulators expect you to have internal processes to combat fraud, know your customers, do not finance terrorism, money laundering et al. — all without laying out actual precise guidelines of what they really expect want to see from an implementation standpoint, keeping you on your toes all the time. This leads to self-inflicted wounds from financial services providers, anticipating that regulators might not like e.g. stoner stocks and preemptive actions to minimize risk of being shut down.
You're totally right, in this case it's child porn. The lawsuit proves Visa's paranoia isn't entirely unjustified, either. That's the thing that pierces the corporate veil and puts executives in jail. Hence the cut off. I'm not sure how we improve the situation though
What makes you assume it’s a moral judgment and not a liability/risk-driven business decision? I’ve almost never observed large businesses, including banks, passing up a chance to make money because of their moral scruples.
> The other day I got a notification that was "FYI we sold your shares in company X (NASDAQ listed)". They've decided they're no longer keen on weed companies and have taken it upon themselves to fix my portfolio to remove such evilness.
You are aware that cannabis is still federally illegal, right?
> What makes you assume it’s a moral judgment and not a liability/risk-driven business decision? I’ve almost never observed large businesses, including banks, passing up a chance to make money because of their moral scruples.
Amazon's firearm accessory rules seem to contain plausible examples of such. Permitted accessories include:
Vise blocks designed to hold firearms, except for those intended for "assault weapons."
Magazine loaders, except for those which can accommodate the following common rifle calibers: .223/5.56; 7.62x51; 308; 7.62x39; 5.45x39
Armorer's wrenches, except those specifically for assault weapons, particularly AR pattern rifles.
Hand gun grips, but not "assault weapon grips".
Implicitly permitted are jig kits except those for ARs specifically (no mention of other assault rifles/weapons. It bans "AR-specific jig kits")
Source with many more examples, many of them sensible restrictions likely motivated by state laws, but many of them perplexingly specific: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external... Is there any state in this union in which restricts sale or possession of vise blocks designed to hold ARs? Not as far as I'm aware.
They also restrict "Offensive and Controversial Materials", saying:
> We maintain these policies to ensure a welcoming environment for our global customers and sellers to do business while offering the widest selection of items on earth. We promote trust and respect, as well as adherence to the law.
> We exercise judgment in allowing or prohibiting listings and we keep our global community of customers and cultural differences and sensitivities in mind when reviewing and making a decision on products.
One of the examples of products they ban is "Products that promote intolerance based on race, religion, and sexual orientation.", which interpreted in an impartial manner would obviously ban the Bible and many other religious texts, but in fact Amazon doesn't actually ban those. They're exercising a lot of judgement in the application of these rules and many apparent contradictions can be found. For instance they claim they won't sell products which promote or glorify terrorism, yet they sell the Unibomber's Manifesto and t-shirts of Che.
This ship has sailed when Gab creator was cut-off from all payment systems.
People widely applauded Visa et. al move, as this Gab guy is a horrible person that ends each message with dreaded "Jesus is King" quotation. So "the people" was happy.
Now people learn the hard lesson, one day your opinion, business, etc. might irritate the powers that be and you'll be crashed, as those who you helped to crash before.
I think a more generous interpretation of his comment would be that "speech protections are only relevant for unpopular speech". Nobody needs freedom of expression to discuss how it's kind of rainy today but hopefully sunny this weekend
You get to call it stupid, you don't get to cut someone's water or electricity off because you think they have a stupid opinion. Same should go for having the ability to pay for stuff and receive money from people who want to give it to you, as long as what you are doing is not illegal.
Is it really a HN discussion about race if someone doesn't mention the "Blacks, Jews"? What next, are we going to call someone an "Oriental"? Weird skull-caliper vocabulary.
How controversial is it to say "genocidal calls for violence should be frustrated by any means necessary, including force"? If Captain America decides to suddenly do a 180 and police the one-drop rule you have my permission to deck him in.
Tolerance is something that should be extended to everything but intolerance. We fought an entire global war about this, but took the wrong lessons when all the major players in the Third Reich got promotions to the UN, NASA, etc.
If you don't understand that free speech is like every other right in that it is not absolute, and does not apply to private platforms - then you should have paid more attention in your middle school civics class.
Gab is a cesspool of hate speech up to and including people using it to advocate things like treating Jewish people like livestock, holocaust denialism, and being used to coordinate conspiracy theories and harassment of innocent people and individuals
Trying to point out where it was going was impossible.
“What if your opinions become deemed unacceptable?”
“What do you mean? My opinions are acceptable.”
“But what if one day they aren’t?”
“They are though. Why do you keep saying they aren’t?”
It's like some clamp comes down on the mind and stops critical thinking, where usually they are pretty thoughtful people otherwise. Self preservation instinct I guess.
> Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements. It seems to be more common too.
Nothing to do with "morals", everything to do with the risks associated with prostitution. Same thing with Cannabis businesses, which payment processors tend to not do business with.
These companies have very little morals, but their executives don't want to be thrown in jail for being digital pimps.
It's a circular argument. Businesses don't do business with Business X, so it's too risky for us to do business with Business X.
Yet we have figured out how to let 16-year old kids drive 5,000-pound blocks of metal in public.
The distinguishing element of the two cases is morality. (Substitute porn for prostitution to sidestep the question of legality; the result is the same.)
I don't want the government to legislate morality. Everyone in a free society should have the choice to be moral or immoral; otherwise there is no morality. But if the U.S. government wants to effectively eliminate cash through post-9/11 KYC/AML laws, structuring laws, increasingly strict service-industry cash-transaction reporting requirements, and so on, then either the government needs to establish a genuinely amoral and private electronic-payment system that allows disgusting, vile, reprehensible, but legal transactions. Or the government must actively affirm the obligation of private payment processors like Visa and Mastercard to support transactions that conflict with their moral preferences.
Our freedoms of speech and association are being swept aside as the government shunts nearly all financial activity through private enterprises. What good is the Bill of Rights if you can't do anything without a debit card?
> It's a circular argument. Businesses don't do business with Business X, so it's too risky for us to do business with Business X.
It isn't a circular argument, running a business is all about risks management, choosing not to do business with people that could be link to sex trafficking mafia is very much effective risk management, that platform can go take their business elsewhere.
This isn't even a partisan issue, prostitution is frowned upon by most payement processors for very objective reasons. It's a non story.
Pretty much all the payment processors cut off Wikileaks without even the government asking them to. And all they did is publish evidence of war crimes.
I know it is not a popular topic here, but this kind of lack of control over (allegedly) your assets is one of the premises for the existence of Bitcoin.
Self-sovereignty and self-custody prevent third-parties from making decisions for you like this, and the removal of intermediaries (like payment processors) also prevent anyone from restricting you ability to transact with your desired counterparties.
The kind of freedom this enables also has disadvantages of course, but I strongly believe the few real "bad" transactions that gets blocked by the current system are a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of people deprived of access to the system and the millions of others who are included but seriously limited in what they are "allowed" to do on it.
Which is not a third-party *required* to do this kind of transactions.
It is just a convenient way to convert the crypto to fiat that these processor handle for their customers. There are ways to handle this step without a third party (P2P exchanges are one).
Less convenient for sure, but ultimately if you care about your economical freedom you will adopt them... or you will live in a walled garden, at least as long as your activity fits the current agenda/policies of these intermediaries (and your government). As soon as you don't, you get kicked out/cut from the system, even if your activity is not illegal.
He's making a point about actual cryptocurrency and smart contracts, and you're trying to refute it by pointing out that the good qualities of crypto do not apply to a random private firm that happened to slap the word "crypto" on its elevator pitch. Many such cases! Someone explains that it's healthy to eat vegetables sometimes, and you respond, "Actually, yesterday I ate a pound of deep-fried broccoli covered in pure corn syrup, and I got diarrhea afterward."
Totally agree, and than you for posting this. You'll probably get a lot of negative comments from haters, but this is the kind of payment censorship that crypto can solve. The worst thing to happen to cryptocurrency in my opinion was fiat exchanges. It created the ability for the legacy banking world and government to have too much of a voice in something that was designed to be the people's exchange of value. We started losing when actual traditional money was exchanged en masse in a way that was tracked. How is that different than any other trackable digital transaction?
There's no difference between someone like visa shutting down processing for porn sites and your bitcoin exchange of choice refusing to pay out cash to porn stars. Porn models gotta eat, and last time I checked Costco doesn't accept bitcoin. Bitcoin can never be "truly free" from US control until it has it's own parallel economy, and that turned out to be a non-starter. And no, "local-bitcoins" is not a solution to that, because the last thing an online personality wants to do is meet up with a stranger who could plausibly discover who they are.
The difference is the step at which that shutdown takes place. When visa shuts down processing for your business, they're taking away your ability to conduct transactions at all. When a bitcoin exchange refuses to do business with you, they're only taking away your ability to convert your BTC to USD (at that particular exchange). You can still conduct transactions directly in BTC (or ETH or what have you). The "cash out to USD" step is much less frequent, and usually less ingrained into the way you conduct business.
A closer comparison would be to a bank that doesn't let a you deposit the cash your business earned at the end of the week. It would be an annoyance, but it doesn't actually prevent you from conducting your business.
> The kind of freedom this enables also has disadvantages of course, but I strongly believe the few real "bad" transactions that gets blocked by the current system are a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of people deprived of access to the system and the millions of others who are included but seriously limited in what they are "allowed" to do on it.
Except that, as we have seen, Bitcoin rarely is used for "we need financial freedom" activities and mostly for "buy into my Ponzi scheme" activities.
Someone could have constructed the crypto equivalent of PayPal. Someone still could and maybe right now is even better since the Ponzibros are getting hammered.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing it. That speaks volumes.
I don't like this trend of financial providers issuing moral judgement, de-banking people, and more either.
I'm pro-BLM but learning Silicon Valley Bank gave BLM millions of dollars before it collapsed rubs me the wrong way.
I need my banks and financial institutions to do their primary job first and foremost. I'm getting to the point where DIE marketing is become a signal of poor upper management trying to hide failures.
Basically the Claremont Institute tallied up announcements of corporate charity that went to anything related to racial minorities, and called that "giving to BLM and supporting riots."
> Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements.
This isn't a moral judgement so much as it is an attempt to avoid association with high fraud risk transactions, which lead to more chargebacks, potential implication of the bank in criminal activity (e.g., money laundering), and greater government scrutiny under initiatives like Obama's Operation Choke Point.
A large segment of the population unfortunately have extremely distorted moral compasses, and a disproportionate number of them likely work in conservative industries such as finance.
Americans on average consider pornographic actors to be more immoral than lobbyists, spies, and lawyers, and second only to politicians. I'm not surprised at this chart but it really depresses my spirits.
You’ll have a hard time establishing a right to financial plumbing for illegal activity. Denial of financial services is a pretty good crime-fighting tool, in that it both scales better and avoids the violence of policing/incarceration.
Alternate take: Companies should have every right to not do business with people they find morally repugnant, but only in industries where there is a "service of last resort". I wouldn't care about visa kicking out perfectly legitimate sex work if they could sign up on, say, the post office's website for a bank account and some basic payment system.
They sold them without your consent? In a cash account? Or margin (and not fully paid)? If the former, I'd be personally looking into recourse, or at least reading any agreements you have on file, because nothing about that sounds remotely above board (though brokerages are known for staying pretty on top of regulations with pretty sizeable legal teams). Asking that you transfer it off the platform is one thing; selling something you custody with them without your permission, on the other hand, exposes you to market risk and ultimately sounds like it's in violation of at least a few rules, given they've not been given discretionary authority in the account.
Some industries get to get away with making a lot of their own decisions there and just shooting themselves in the foot if they feel like it, but with the thick regulations in the capital markets, this sounds like an overreach. They can kick YOU off the platform, but even when doing that, they typically need to leave your securities alone in an account that you still get to choose when to sell.
I think payment services really come under 'utilities' or 'essential services', if not quite 'human rights'.
And thus processors should be required by law to provide service to everyone unless they are clearly doing something illegal, and even then, it's a matter for the police and courts, not private corporations or individuals.
UN lists [1] the right to work as a human right. Payment services are irreplaceable for all kinds of businesses, so a blanket denial of payment services is arguably already a violation of human rights.
And I think this is also targeted at pornography? I'm not sure where USA is in the pornography rankings, but I'm fairly sure it's nowhere near the bottom (sorry).
But the point is, even if it were all illegal, that's probably a matter for the police, not for private interests to deny an essential service 'just in case', or because 'we don't want to do business with those people'
, etc.
There's a clear difference between 'aiding and abetting', and the much vaguer 'facilitating', 'supporting', which could be true of phone, or electricity companies for example.
But I believe those companies are required to provide service, as they are 'utilities'.
COnfused. It was a bitcoin platform? Isn't the whole point of that stuff, to allow anonymous payments? How can this issue even be a thing?
I'm guessing, because bitcoin never worked. Never provided the anonymity it promised. Became just another currency, regulated by whatever random public exchange you signed up for.
The company receiving the payment needs to convert the BTC to fiat if they want to pay their employees, infrastructure costs, etc.
At a small scale, there are a lot of options to go around it and also avoid KYC, but it's not really a viable solution for a company. They have to work with a bank or another payment processor to convert the crypto and/or manage whatever traditional currency the crypto is converted to. A few years ago, there was a wave of large company accepting crypto (eg. tesla), but most of them have backed down from it.
It's like accepting gold coins as a payment for your company. You can't pay your taxes or wages with those even if they have a stable value.
> Wyre Payments, the company’s upstream payment processor, terminated SpankPay’s account because Wyre’s new payment processor, Checkout.com, doesn’t allow processing for payments related to sexual businesses, SpankPay said.
I wonder if they could go direct to Wyre’s old payment processor?
A good and entertaining piece on who Rules the online Porn industy is the podcast "
Hot Money: porn, power and profit" [1] from The Financial Times
In the end it is the credit card industry who dictacte what is and is not allowed to be paid using their system. If they shut you off you are basically fucked..
Misleading title. "Crypto" is as much a factor as "sex work", and "sex work" (like "crypto") is not clearly described -- there are both legal and illegal forms.
Also no comment on the fraud/chargeback rate in Spank's transaction flow.
Why would a sex worker want to get paid in crypto currency and then pay a shit ton of fees to convert it to local fiat currency to pay for basic living expenses (rent, health, food, credit card bills).
We completely privatized payments without realizing it. Credit cards are no longer some extra benefit on top of your bank account, it's how basically almost all commerce is required now. Private companies collect basically a tax on almost all transactions in our economy.
I don't know how we let them get away with this. Facilitating commerce should 100% be a government operation and be free. To accept cash I pay paying the US government a fraction of a percent I'm taxes compared to credit card fees.
The fact that, on top of all this, they are essentially policing what can and cannot be sold and bought should be outrageous to people. It's a complete conflict of interest that companies can shut down payments to and from competitors to their investments.
People can say "oh just don't use or accept visa etc" but good luck staying in business or buying anything online.
We absolutely need some kind of government backed digital payment system in my opinion. Credit card rewards should also be illegal they are nothing but hidden fees passed to you by charging the business more.
I have a feeling that a government run payment system would also forbid illegal activity (eg laundering, etc). I agree that a private payments network is not ideal but the question at hand is how should transactions facilitating illegal activity be handled?
To be clear I’m not passing a moral judgement on sex work - just pointing out the fact that it’s presently illegal in many forms and jurisdictions and that fact is relevant.
Well Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover combined have almost a $1.5T market cap - so if you think the government is going to put them out of business - you must have a different perception of what the government does than I do...
> Private companies collect basically a tax on almost all transactions in our economy.
Forget transactions, they collect a tax on almost all money in the economy. Something like 97% of money in circulation is simply bank loans (like mortgages) that haven't been paid back yet.
I encourage anyone to walk around a financial district somewhere and really think about what it's all for. On the inside of some of those buildings there might be people, but they aren't doing much. On the inside of many there aren't even any people.
Finance definitely has value, but is it really that much? It's a fraction of what they take.
How they get away with it is the interesting part. There's just something about money. There will always be a very large part of the population who just don't get it. Then there are some who excel with it. It brings out the worst in many and it downright scares the rest. All that's clear is we need to get a grip on it. Bitcoin was the latest attempt.
I can't recommend enough the book Other People's Money by John Kay.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadSounds like it would end the same if they were a "normal" sex work payment platform.
Now when you say 'but it's only going to be used by the sex industry', you're adding another area of high fraud on top. It's hardly surprising that financial companies want nothing to do with two high-risk sectors sandwiched on top of each other.
Thus they will demand the charge to be reverted and thus, many charges being disputed simply because of people’s prudishness. And then porn site operators have high fraud rates. I wonder if they are also more liable to become victims of card testing.
I think honest people would concede that there are many, many legit issues around chargebacks. But if it's about money, then just say it's about money and everyone can sit down and go to work on finding methods of reducing chargebacks that actually work.
This seeems to cross over from 'we dont want your business' into purposefully targetting and harrasing activists.
Maybe their should be investigation to make sure these provideds aren't conspiring?
"If you don't like it, build your own <piece of underlying infrastructure>". [repeat recursively].
More productive comment: protocols > platforms.
They were using crypto. Didn't help.
Not including the on-ramp from fiat to crypto inside the app would solve the issue, I would think.
I don’t think Coinbase for example would knowingly allow a prostitute, whose inbound source of tokens is coming from a digital pimping service, to convert them to USD and then ACH the cash to her local bank.
Financial services is a very different arena.
There's whole domains where AI doing it is just infeasible. For all the other domains, who tells the AI what to do? Who knows how to be specific enough and precise enough to get the right output?
Until you have full-on AGI that can talk to stakeholders, gather requirements, build an incremental mental model of what the requirements are, and all that jazz, programmers will have the same job as they do today: tell the computer what to do. It's just that we'll be using a different language to do it in.
I wonder what the proportions work out to be, if you break the work into "the hard bit" vs the "automatable bit", Ive defiantly worked on projects where there is one novel bit that had to be done just right, but 80% of the time was still spent setting up standard databases, payment processors, customer interfaces.
BTW, this is what’s happened with every other programmer productivity increase. No company has responded with ‘cool, our product is done’ and instead has expanded what the product can do. Customers then expect more, and the cycle continues.
In fact, the same sentence may be true if you replace AI tools with any technology that improves programmers’ productivity: advanced frameworks for example. The issue is that if programmer productivity shoots through the roof — if you need only one programmer to do the job of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand — then it can result in massive layoffs of programmers. It need not be the case that new technologies be accessible to non-programmers for this to happen.
The same thing is happening in other areas. My friend works in robotic welding. He programs robots to perform specific welds and then supervises them operating during the assembly of each truck chassis. As a single person, he’s doing the work of half a dozen journeyman welders. This amplification of his productivity by technology means his factory needs far fewer welders to get the same work done. It should come as no surprise, then, that older journeymen welders have been very vocal in expressing their hostility towards him throughout his career. “Learn to code” indeed.
I don't think so.
When ChatGPT can write code to the query: "Hey, the production server acted weird last weekend, could be about that issue we talked about on slack yesterday, could you have a look at that?", then I' going to start worrying about my job security.
The easy part of anything can be replaced by AI. It's the hard part that's the problem.
Interesting phrase, "financial discrimination" (and "banking discrimination" later in the article), curious to see it here considering Vice's (and similar media outlets) lack of interest or ra ra attitude to deplatforming when seeing it applied to services and people they disapprove of in the past.
Seems a valid phrase to use though if a platform is powerful and ubiquitous enough to cause existential issues to legal entities it doesn't like or have bad PR.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/08/the-slate-star-codex-p...
You mean there are people with conservative beliefs writing for VICE?
According to Wikipedia he has described himself as "a fiscal conservative and libertarian" whereas Wikipedia describes the Proud Boys as "far-right neo-fascist".
Vice doesn't seem to have any political allegiance in terms of US partisan politics but I think it's fair to describe them as socially progressive but otherwise (right) libertarian. They seem to be more "anti-establishment" than left or right.
Everyone is either "The Man" and therefore evil, or is sticking it to "The Man" and is therefore heroic. I've been friends with people that have been interviewed by Vice - this is the single most annoying thing about them. Most of them are hobbyists (Nintendo-console related, both modding and emulation) who do what they do "because it's cool and fun to do".
Then Vice barges in, interviews them and/or their team members and suddenly the angle under which the coverage is presented becomes how these awesome, super cool hackers are doing it because they want to stick it to the Big Evil Nintendo which is just... not at all the motive. None of those people are/were out to be a David taking up the sword against the Goliath that is Nintendo. They just wanted to tinker with a console because of curiosity.
Vice is (alongside to a lesser degree Kotaku) responsible for basically ruining any conversation about homebrew, console modding and emulation by putting the "it's good to pirate actually" motivation front and center for hacking and modifying consoles. Like... fucking talk to these people. Almost every single one hates having their work associated with piracy since it can cause serious reputational harm (and is often inaccurate to boot), yet Vice doesn't give a single flying shit about that since Nintendo is "The Man" and that means that any action that can be construed as being against them is morally justified.
Probably one of the worst outlets to ever link (and for what it counts, what they cover usually has better coverage elsewhere so... yeah, avoid them if you can). Strongly also recommend to avoid ever talking to them if you can help it, they will slant the conversation to further that editorial policy if they can.
They are Goliath, and the random conservative twitter people they write hit pieces on are David.
I was interviewed by some large magazines and some TV stations years back (Germany, topic was Geocaching and Confluencing - we had some firsts, yes! ;-). All of them came with a finished story and were only looking for sound bites.
"Sex work" used to be called prostitution and considered morally bad by most people until about 5 minutes ago. That's why principles matter, otherwise you are at the mercy of the mob of people who will decide for you what to think.
Prostitution is a subset of sex work.
Sex work is considered immoral under certain currently dominant religious doctrines. Mind you, even Christianity originally carved out a niche for sex work (Jesus certainly was more kind to those earning their living with sex work than to those earning it by exploiting the poor). Arguably this hangup in the modern day largely stems from Christianity and Islam however, which means it started less than 2000 years.
But morality doesn't tell you much because it literally comes down to religious doctrine, which only works for practitioners of the given faith and can still change over time depending on which interpretation of scripture is taken as canonical (e.g. few Christians getting in a huff over strip clubs would feel equally offended by mixed fabrics). This is why I didn't say "moral people" or "immoral things" but "good people" and "bad things".
Good and bad are value judgments that can be entirely arbitrary, i.e. what I might consider a good person is someone you might consider a bad person. This in turn can be based on a coherent system of ethics you follow or even something entirely inconsistent like most ethical systems that try to incorporate morality even when it conflicts with personal intuitive beliefs (this often leads to feelings of shame and guilt).
Ethics contrary to morality are usually defined in terms of harm and benefit. These terms are again subjective because they hinge on core beliefs, e.g. I think the goal should be for all people to have the ability to live a fulfilling life and not worry about having their basic needs met so my understanding of harm and benefit is defined in terms of whether something contributes to or detracts from that. Many people share core beliefs that are similar enough to be compatible with mine, so our shared system of ethics is "intersubjective" rather than subjective (i.e. entirely up to the individual) or "objective" (i.e. a universal truth claim about the universe).
So is sex work "good" under my system of ethics? No? Yes? Not really? Sex in itself is not inherently harmful so that doesn't make it bad. Transactional exchanges are not ideal but sex work is hardly unique in that. Arguably sex work is exploitative because most sex workers would prefer doing other work if they had the opportunity and weren't suffering from external pressures (often financial ones) but some sex workers genuinely enjoy their work as long as they know they can perform it in a safe environment. But that again isn't inherent in sex work itself but follows from the power/wealth imbalances and exploitation of the kyriarchy (i.e. sexism, capitalism, etc). So an instance of sex work may be bad but the act of performing sex work itself isn't necessarily even when the act of consuming sex work might be.
But speaking of missing the point, remember what I actually said: most people don't like it when bad things happen to good people even if they like it when bad things happen to bad people. "Bad things" in this case refers to circumstances that negatively affect the individual's ability in the above sense. "Bad people" referring to people whose actions negatively affect (everyone) else's ability in that sense.
Personally I think it's best for bad things not to happen to anyone if we can avoid it because enjoying the suffering of others is in itself detrimental to achieving said goals. But some level of schadenfreude seems to be a universal part of the human experience, so I still stand by what I said.
Of course things get messy when your ethics have to account for fairly intricate moral codes with tons of rules that boil down to being justified with "because God says so": good luck trying to incorporate "also you shouldn't wear mixed fabrics" into an ethical system you can apply day-t...
"Sex work is ok because I agree with it, and agitating for a fascist society is not, because I disagree with it" - when someone could as easily say "Sex work is bad, because I disagree with it, and agitating for a fascist society is good, because I agree with it". It's a moral standpoint based on your beliefs (My beliefs are right).
You can climb the moral ladder if you base the same argument ("sex" vs. "fascism") on some common ground, E.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
(I would wish that people would not throw "fascist" aka. everyone who disagrees with me, around as easily and read some fascism theory - E.g. Sternhell - before and distingiush it from Dictatorships, Nationalsocialism, Authoritarianism etc.)
If nothing works, try ad hominem arguments. It is still an argument, but a very weak (the weakest?) one.
"You are wrong because it's you" has the same problems as "The things I think are ok, are ok, and the things I think are bad, are bad", it doesn't try to be universal and revolves around oneself. Also these kind of arguments have the tendency to lead to an echo chamber with no progress on understanding.
PS: You might be right, I've studied Philosophical Computer Science, but it doesn't strengthen your argument. It's like saying "You're wrong because you wear a blue hat, when I wear a blue hat".
I'm not engaging in an abstract philosophical exercise with the goal of furthering humanity's understanding of morality or whatever it is you think we're doing.
I'm pointing out that spending time and energy trying to formulate perfectly nuanced universalizable mozaics of morality and slotting your positions into them is foolish.
An alternative is just having good judgement, and acting on it. Is that perfect? Can it be generalized to all cases? No! And it doesn't matter because sex workers should be able to get paid without dying and fascism is bad. You don't need that shit today take it to your debate club maybe they'll like it.
I'm not from the US, we don't have high schools here and we don't have debate clubs. And I personally don't care the least about US moral judgements. No one outside the US (96% of the world population) cares about US moral judgements. I still have a trauma because as a kid I was forced to watch sitcoms with only black people and sitcoms with only white people, as if there were two planets (Golden Girls was neat though, Cosby didn't age that well - it was ok to rape women but not ok to kiss someone white on TV - how fu is that). But thanks for assuming. The world doesn't revolve around you, the US is not the center of the world. I know, shocking. Get over it. I'm just happy that the days of US culture imperialism and gun-point morale exports ends and no one is forced to care about your views in the future ("But we have atomic bombs!" Yes, heard that before recently). Iraq and Afghanistan showed the emporer wears no clothes. Sad thing is I probably need to learn Chinese, when the other bully enters the stage (there is always a bully) but at least it's a change + "Wandering Earth" wasn't that bad ... Humming 51st state
Hint: it's not. So the burden of proof is on you.
Why exactly do you think sex work is ok and tolerable in society?
Therefore, progress is wrong.
While on the other hand discrimination implies characteristics that a person can't (reasonably be expected to) change, in this case a profession.
That's how Hatreon etc came to be
What's the difference between an electricity provider and a banking platform?
It's worth noting that most US jurisdictions have laws that limit how and when utilities, whether managed publicly or privately, can terminate service. A common example is not being able to cut off gas service in the middle of winter, even if the customer is severely behind on payments.
We don't have to worry so much about the slippery slope you describe because we have already established regulatory backstops that consider utilities different from other businesses.
It's not deplatforming for political reasons. It's deplatforming bigots.
Currently I'm not afraid to say that gay marriage should be legalised, because the worst that could happen is that some homophobe could insult me with homophobic slurs. But if extra-judicial persecution of political opponents is normalised and encouraged then I sure as hell would keep my mouth shut, because I don't want to lose my job and my bank account.
A business that deplatforms "bigots" today could easily start deplatforming "baby killers" and "family wreckers" tomorrow.
Is your position that there is no human opinion for which de-banking is acceptable?
If the views people espouse are illegal, then punish them via the law.
What about illegal activities outside of the law's jurisdiction?
>>If the views people espouse are illegal, then punish them via the law.
This also goes for their activities.
There is a clear difference between someone saying "I think Terrorist Group X is great" on twitter and someone using their bank account so that Terrorist Group X can buy stuff to make bombs. And even in that latter case, once the person concerned has finished their prison sentence they should still get a bank account so they can live.
E.g. If someone gets kicked off and kept out of some social media platform or gets denied the opportunity to speak at some public event, or interviewers boycott them even when their role normally would get interviewed, gets kicked out of a job which gives them public outreach (e.g. journalism or university) or some venue refuses to rent them facilities for a talk - to me, all of that is deplatforming no matter if it's because of political opinion or innate characteristics like the color of their skin or religion or whatever. If all the media agree to not show or discuss red-haired people, that's obviously deplatforming red-haired people.
And on the opposite side, if someone gets hurt in other ways that don't change "the platform" - their landlord kicks them out, they get fired by an employer that "only" provides money but not a platform for outreach, their customers drop them - all of that isn't deplatforming but ordinary discrimination, again no matter if it's because of political opinion or innate characteristics like the color of their skin or religion or whatever (that would only affect whether that's prohibited discrimination).
"The end justifies the means!" as Machiavelli put it.
I'm really not sure there is any business doing porn money processing in a way that is safe from getting the rug pulled below them at any moment.
Umm. Do you think Pornhub is bigger than Google or Amazon, or even Netflix?
By revenue not...
Prostitution is, for the majority of places illegal.
Is a stripper a sex worker (I guess so), but they don't have to avail themselves of this sort of service in most places because their work is legal.
Let's say you live in a place where gambling is illegal. Lets say that you open a blackjack and slots room in your garage. If your local bank manager finds out that the piles of cash you bring in are from an illegal source, they are likely to show you the door because they want nothing to do with you.
Google around and you will find articles from the early days of medical weed, and how hard banking was for those providers! Hell this got resolved but the fact that it happened should make your eyes pop: https://ij.org/press-release/federal-government-will-return-...
https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/articles/4419872101139-Ear...
All owned by one company, and when the government (or worse, some random quango) says jump, they say how high. Content on the no-no list disappears overnight (e.g. ever wondered why you never see breathplay in online porn?).
Panel 1: A: So let's go over this again. If I take a woman out for drinks and dinner, hoping this will influence her decision to have sex with me, this is legal? B: Correct.
Panel 2: A: But if instead of taking her out, I offer her the same amount of money in cash form to have sex with me, that's illegal? B: Correct.
Panel 3: A: But if I pay a woman to have sex with me, hire a camera crew to film it, and sell the results for profit, that's legal again? B: Correct.
Panel 4: A: Sorry, can we go through that one more time?
Also there's a very obvious difference between the 1st one and the 2nd one.
Try telling a random woman, that you matched on Tinder or whatever, that you'll pay for sex. You'd get called a disgusting pervert and blocked. Can you figure out why?
I know it doesn't invalidate the point made and I support the freedom of adult individuals to do whatever they want with consenting parties, but it's an important piece of information to consider for understanding the whole issue. We cannot simply turn a blind eye at the massive damage the porn and prostitution industries are doing to society.
I worry though that forcing participants to use obscure payment methods will obscure evidence of human trafficking and rights abuse even more.
That does not reduce the harm inflicted. But also it is worth keeping in mind that having an independent stream of income allows SW in the porn industry to better negotiate good working conditions.
And re going for obscure stuff generating problems. It is already the case and we have good case studies following SESTA/FOSTA..
The purpose of law is to tame commercial activities for protection of its commerce and prosperity. By legalizing something that is a net social harm, giving it guiderails so that it can lead to more stability and profit, you have incentivized that harm to reproduce maliciously. It is like offering subsidies to fossil fuels. No, it is like putting regulations on fossil fuels and giving them legitimacy.
Some industries should stay in the dark unprotected always looking over their shoulder for when they might get caught.
We put regulation on fossil fuels as a practical matter of recognizing the reality in which we operate, and the harms that will come to real people if we outlawed it without a viable solution to the rest of the problems that would create.
> Some industries should stay in the dark unprotected always looking over their shoulder for when they might get caught.
This sounds nice, but the practical implications are that already disadvantaged people are further abused and taken advantage of. No one should want that type of system.
Disadvantaged people should be not in the porn industry for some wealthy person's self fulfillment. We call that abuse. And the wealthy should be penalized.
In many countries the work itself is legal, but you find such fun twists as:
"You have to operate using cash because banks won't work with you because its legal in Your City/State but not at a State/Federal/National level above that",
"You're not allowed to register as a business and subject to substantial tax penalties",
"Individuals are allowed to do it, but its illegal for a multiple people to organise and work together as a business",
"Your allowed to do it, but only inside your own property, as its illegal for rented commercial or residential property to knowingly provide you such a premises"
... Generally speaking its more common that you find its a case of "It's legal for you the human individual to get paid to have sex, but... not legal to X, Y, or Z" which is how for every step forward, people in this line of work continue to face persecution. Its also sadly one of the ways this the progress gets made, by wheeling and dealing in politics, so they get the legalising change done, but had to trade away any measures that protect worker rights, or changes to decriminalise working as a business together, or to operate a dedicated premises... there's usually one or more catches left over by all the compromise needed to get any movement on the core issue... and so people look at it and go "what's the problem, its legal isn't it?"... to which the response is "well yes... but..." ... And most people have already tuned out before they finish the word "but".
There is absolutely no empirical evidence for this - as it happens, a live social experiment is taking place in Europe. The trafficking networks in the East kicked into overdrive to supply the needs of the German and Belgian legal or gray brothels.
There is only one policy that works, demand minimization by outlawing payment for sex. This is what Sweden has done and, far from empowering pimps, it has largely solved the issue of trafficking, while the "Legalize it" group of countries saw it explode. The data speaks for itself.
That "solution" may help with trafficking, but hasn't solved the issues of:
* right to pursue a living wage wity honest work
* right to pursue sexual health
Farming and manufacturing also have trafficking problems. Should it be illegal to pay for cars and food?
If not, what makes selling sex different?
No one should have the right to purchase any arbitrary person for sexual gratification. It should be my right to bodily autonomy, and I should be able to accept money for work that involves my body.
As a carpenter, I can accept money and in exchange, do work that is tough on my body and will have long-term physical effects. I should be able to also accept money in exchange for using my own body for to sexually gratify someone (I'm certainly allowed to do it free).
The right we should have is the right to decide how our body is used, not how we can use the body of someone else.
The (local government) departments that work with helping sex workers should be very glad to hear this since they have been quite overworked since covid. If the issue is largely solved they can move workers away from that and focus on other forms of trafficking.
But I do not believe the claim that Sweden has largely solved the issue of trafficking. Looking at the most recent published information from BRÅ (the government department for research and development within the judicial system), the amount of prostitution has increased significant and reached the highest ever peak last year (https://bra.se/download/18.146acb6517fd55784012735/165580083... page 30). The problem seem to have significant grown and is continuing growing.
Feel free to overlay statistics from Germany or Belgium if you want to provide evidence that their model is somehow worse. The complains I hear from Belgium is mostly about how the housing situation around the red street districts has become too expensive, and that people who lives there are tired of the tourism.
Now, customers can't admit to having been there at all, and so won't report their perception or what they were explicitly told by the sex worker.
This is ironic as your belief is based on the issue of trafficking being solved because you don't hear the reports or the stats dropped.
> The data speaks for itself.
Hysterical. It should be criminal that even sex work advocates in the US are attempting to recreate Sweden's model based on this flawed view. The unsaid reality is that people just aren't comfortable with how normal the consumers of sex work are, and don't want to find out that it isn't an antisocial "other".
Sex work is a labor rights issue. Sex trafficking is a labor rights issue just like labor trafficking is a labor rights issue. One that has nothing to do with punitive or criminal measures of the laborers or consumers, only the traffickers. Normalizing both the supply and the demand side in conjunction with increased avenues for labor assistance is the most holistic solution.
Legalisation of pimping isn't necessary.
So in this particular case, what do you mean by "human trafficking?"
It's a great way to launder money for example: the goods are transient, frequently cross national borders, but are only video streams and pictures, and easily explainable at huge purchase rates.
The problem is that for payment processors, the business simply attracts problems through a myriad of historical social factors which are well beyond their control.
And you know that how? Because it's the mantra some interested parties repeat?
Those very exploitative business have a ton of money and can always find ways to launder money. The only ones hurted by these bans are the actual independent sex workers, who cannot afford to find alternatives because <gasp> they are independent so they don't have the resources.
Stop trying to save the world. All your good will will only hurt the small ones.
By your very limited logic, denying drug traffickers access to the banking system hurts poor coca farmers in Bolivia. Well yes, it does, any policy choice involves compromises.
You can help to democratize it (i. e. independent sex workers) or you can help the big bad guys (by denying independent sex workers access to a payment system they can easily access). Using your very limited non-logic, you have decided you want to help the big guys. Congratulations.
If I refuse to serve black customers because they are more likely to be criminals, I am going to get a well deserved anti-discrimination lawsuit. That's because we understand that discriminating against black people will only make the problem worse. But discriminating against sex workers is fine, and indeed, it makes the problem worse.
For other jobs, the government protects its workers. For example, by making sure workshops comply with safety regulations. For sex workers, the law essentially says "you can't open a workshop", which is all but helpful as it just put these "workshops" in the hands of criminals, and leave sex workers with no protection.
Citation needed. The idea that human trafficking is a thing and that it has been increasing "in recent years" is a delusion. It is not backed up by the criminal processing data. And in fact the special "human trafficking" courts set up in the USA in the 20-teens were shut down a couple years later due to a lack of any cases to process.
Human trafficking being a thing to worry about is entirely a news media infotainment story.
A general labor rights approach would allow more independents to exist and controlled persons have more reporting options and people to confide in. Node based, like the concept of herd immunity.
No, the threat won't need to be anywhere close to real. It will be abused politically against whoever is disagreeing with the government, like it was against the truckers demoing in Canada.
The banking system is actually already weaponized case when stakes are high. In my own nominally democratic country, access to loans for the presidential campaign is already refused by national banks to the party that ranked second the last two times. The leader then had to ask for Russian funding...
Tons of people have been protesting about the Canadian government and COVID measures outside of that blockade (up to this day), and their bank account is still fine.
Government-run payment systems have to have explicit legal grounds to make decisions, and their ability to make discriminatory decisions is curtailed by constitutional requirements for fair and equal treatments. A government-run payment system can and will block payments which are for a purpose which the general society through their elected representatives has decided to be criminal, and if the society changes their mind (as it has on many things) they can legalize that stuff, and it will also become legal in the payment system.
On the other hand, the current privately-run system can (and already does!) block payments which are for a purpose which a few unelected rich dudes have unilaterally decided do be undesirable; and if the society decides to legalize that stuff, they can ignore it as that's their arbitrary private choice and they can't be held accountable.
People are obsessed eith the idea that censorship can only come from government, they are completely blind to the idea of that rich individuals have agendas and power to advance them.
> everything flows through 3-4 “private” entities
Brilliant separation of concerns isn't it. -- The government says we can have all the porn we want (1st amendment) -- The cc processors say "we won't let you pay for it" (google: bill ackman )
Now find me a pollution who wants to pass some sort of pro porn bill to make the CC processors allow for these payments.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_objections_to_pornogra...]
CSAM is basically evidence of a crime, so it's treated as such, private entities are pressured to monitor for it, detect it, quarantine it, etc.
Which in some abstract sense is okay. (We have data on rising child abuse, including sexual, also data on rising CSAM on the internet and so on, so some very effective interest groups are trying to "do something".) Now, of course, it might not come as a complete surprise to you here on HN that the pragmatic concerns about the approach, proposals, implementation, lawcraft and whatnot involved are far outweigh even the wildest claims of benefits, the whole enterprise is very counter-productive, at best security-theater, but in reality it's just a fucking public interest disaster (FOSTA/SESTA, basically War on Sex Work, yet another highly acclaimed installment of the War On series!), an in a convenient secondary effect it's a "free moat" for the incumbents.
The obvious legal issue is that it's "impossible" to say what it CSAM and what is something that looks like that. For example, what if, there's a machine that generates pictures that look like CSAM? You might advertise it, but likely in no time the DoJ and a bunch of other federal and state entities would sue (and of course arrest, raid, detain) you arguing that somewhere there's actual CSAM in the process, it's distribution, etc.
And even if simple plain "aliens in a vacuum" reading of the law indicates that eventually the government would lose these cases, it's very realistic that the courts themselves would just make new law that in effect criminalizes this even more victimless version too.
But, all in all, with enough advocacy it's possible, just there are very few people who want to spend their life on this.
In a way it shows that the first amendment isn't really all that absolute. Say something that enough powerful people find gross and they'll just make it out to be an unstated exception.
You are so fixated on Government, you miss the forest for the trees.
If these 3 organisations are run by similar people with similar agendas, you can have universal censorship.
No need for government. Tyrany has been privatized
[1]https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/07/2023-02...
I did not downvote, but my opinion of your comment is at best it doesn't add to the discussion. At worst, it's flame-bait. I mention this only because these are potential reasons for downvote as well.
It's all speculation though, because I too have no knowledge of who is downvoting you and why.
That is where the speculation comes in. My hypothesis: HN crowd is more centered towards innovation and new ideas, and frown upon anything that mimics old regulations. I guess the porn industry is a ground of innovation and new ideas right now.
Here in Europe we don't even have a dispute - it's legal up to a point, and we don't see much benefit to fight over when exactly this point happens. It's usually ok for practical purposes.
Probably as old as time.
Big parts of the internet are like constant reality tv dramas.
Ameen is definitely 1 standard deviation smarter than me. The clock speed of his brain made me feel like an outdated CPU.
They were kind people. They really cared about vulnerable people getting reliable income.
I hope all of them the best.
If you're in a position to hire anybody from their team, strongly consider reaching out to them.
Also, I don't know why that user finds that paying for porn is bad and "simpish" (hah). If you're OK with porn and enjoy it, how's bad paying for the effort of the performer? It's not like your like you're skipping paying some dollars to a giant like Disney...
I know this a touchy subject, but I think their hearts were in the right place back in 2018 when we met.
Please let me know if there have been any allegations since then and I'll amend my previous comment.
The other day I got a notification that was "FYI we sold your shares in company X (NASDAQ listed)". They've decided they're no longer keen on weed companies and have taken it upon themselves to fix my portfolio to remove such evilness. Left me slightly speechless...I'm paying you to hold shares not be moral police ffs.
edit: this was a self-managed portfolio hence my surprise at getting notified about successful trade
https://thedalesreport.com/cannabis/euroclear-to-stop-suppor...
I just thought it is very much left field for an own-managed share account
My first thought was I had gotten hacked (yay lastpast) & someone is trading on my account
Have you considered that this may have been a decision based on “we might get sued for being party to human trafficking” reasons?
The public was becoming too liberal, didn't have a strong enough reaction to "prostitution" anymore. Hence they started relabeling most voluntary prostitution disingenuously and even changing laws to make clearly "nothing special" also be "sex trafficking" ... like a man traveling for a weekend getaway to another city with two half-sugar baby half-prostitites.
No it’s not. Whatever moral judgement the government assigns to a crime is irrelevant to a company who is staring down the barrel of a lawsuit for being party to said crime.
In the end, all it would take is one case of a pimp accepting payment for his underaged prostitutes via this company for the payment processor to be sued into oblivion, so they made the rational decision to not open themselves to this risk any longer.
Payment processors are really hard to sue unless they are directly involved in fraud. Which is why person to person payment processors like Venmo can operate.
What? No it's not. Here's an example of a payment processor that got sued for being the payment processor used by a debt settlement firm that merely "overcharged consumers, took untimely fees, misrepresented the value of its services, and failed to make critical disclosures about consumer harms."[0]
> Payment processors are really hard to sue unless they are directly involved in fraud.
All of that is merely a question of the scale of the activity and how badly the government wants to stop it. Same reason cryptocurrency escaped taxing/reporting requirements for many years -- the scale and the ire of the government just wasn't there yet.
Relevant to this discussion, the payment processor in question is associated with a company that makes no bones about providing services for people engaged in work that is illegal in many jurisdictions! If you don't think that would eventually land both companies in the government's crosshairs, I don't know what to tell you. Take "fair" out of the equation, if you're a business owner it's not about "fair", it's about saving your ass. It's not a moral judgement for a company to voluntarily disassociate themselves from another company engaged in illegal behavior.
> Which is why person to person payment processors like Venmo can operate.
Venmo's TOS has named restrictions on what customers can do (and "at our discretion" clauses), and they absolutely will ban users for violating them if it either Venmo can prove it or if they government starts threatening them over it.
0: https://www.mass.gov/news/ags-office-reaches-settlement-with...
Also, by your reasoning Venmo's TOS is a thin shield vs a single case of under age prostitution.
The issue for gambling and sex payment processors is that they are easy targets for politicians looking for votes: someone who hates them will vote for such a candidate and few will bother to come out in support. Those politicians become the regulators, so in exchange for chilling on some issue or another the payment processors agree to “crack down”
I was surprised by it. Literally every congressional district, not just every state.
I thought the plane was cool, but even as a teen I could see that it was pointless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
It’s fine to create regulation that’s voted upon, it’s not okay to use financial firms to push moral or societal change in collusion with governments.
The British Empire, a “democracy”, used to invade countries for slave trading. Then when slavery was made illegal it then invaded countries under the guise of stopping slavery!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35274139
EDIT: Never mind. I see that the previous poster had confused the two and linked to the consumer products company, not the tobacco company.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35274139
This is probably the link you meant to post:
"Reynolds American parent BAT named third-highest rated ESG performer in global ranking"
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reynolds-american-p...
I don’t think payment processors care, but they have margins they want to maintain. Dipping their margins for particular companies or industries would be making a moral decision.
For your mutual fund, I expect similar in that weed stocks aren’t performing as well as they once were and aren’t projected to perform as well so they no longer fit the targets of your fund. I’d read the prospectus before assuming some moral aversion to weed.
Sex workers get a lot of repeat business and aren’t used for the kind of stolen credit card validation that hits many online businesses.
Then again I don't hire prostitutes in the first place. I suppose those that do probably have a higher tolerance for criminal risk.
The evidence on this is readily available via Google. Just search for high risk industries for payment processors, it will always include sex industry stuff.
Then in order to sell the lie to their spouse, they call the credit card company and say, "Of course I didn't make those purchases! I would never do such a thing! I'm not some kind of pervert! Remove these charges immediately or I'll close my account!"
And then the credit card company's thought process is like, "Well, you probably did! But we can pretend you didn't, if that's what it takes to keep you as a customer so we can keep making money off you."
Financial institutions should not be allowed to discriminate against law abiding citizens. If a transaction is legal it should be their job to move the money from party A to party B.
> Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements. It seems to be more common too.
This "freedom of speech isn't freedom of consequences" line is exactly the sort of attitude people take in the countries in which the government does suppress free speech, and they think it's just perfectly fine. You have freedom of speech and every country then, the consequences just going to jail.
There's a limit to this. There should be consequences for you saying things that are wrong, lying to people, spreading hatred, and so on. However, protecting basic human decency in the ability to continue to participate in society is incredibly important to preserving free expression across our nations.
Being able to purchase things, being able to post to the internet, are both aspects of this. It's fine to have this attitude when they're is a strong diversity of companies that allow you to participate and is likely that not all of them can collude with each other.
We have two payment processing companies. Four social media companies, and those four all literally live in the same city.
The patj you tread is a path leading to suppression of speech, and the point of free speech is to ensure that people are able to speak without fear of undue consequence.
There is even old communist-era joke about that:
Is here in USSR the same freedom of speech like in western countries?
Yes, there is freedom of speech, but in western countries there is also freedom after speech.
Every time someone mentions that what they are doing is protected free speech, there is someone on HN that feels necessary to make "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences" as an argument.
Sure, at it's most simplistic this is true. However, if exercising a right results in you being homeless when your behavior was legal, and protected as a matter of course by the law, then there is something wrong.
What you are missing, and what everyone who makes this argument is missing, is that Freedom of Speech isn't /just/ a law, it's also a social more, and that social more has shifted, which means speech is now a universally dangerous behavior, regardless of whether or not you will be prosecuted. This isn't just a collective decision of society, it's a consequence of our more interconnected world, the concentration of wealth and power, and how that wealth and power unequally is applied to people based on whether or not they're liked by the wealthy and powerful.
Multi-national corporations, that literally hold charters to sit on the boards of central banks, that are deeply interconnected with the US government, while actively extra-governmentally, do not get to go "muh consequences" when they penalize citizens in life-altering ways for doing legal activities. Banking isn't exactly a right, but you should not be stripped of your ability to bank for doing completely legal things. Being forced to be unbanked, being unable to take payment for your work, and/or being fired from your job are not "muh consequences", they are an attempt by the wealthy and the powerful to utterly suppress speech they don't like, and to oppress the people, the individuals, who dare to utter, write, or share things they disapprove of. In many ways, these are more material than government action.
Anytime someone tells me they care about marginalized communities while also trotting out "muh consequences" has told me that they don't care about marginalized communities. When making this argument you always envision somebody on Twitter you enjoyed being part of the mob to pillory, but those aren't the people who suffer "muh consequences" the most, it's always people at the margins. It's the lady who is forcibly unbanked because she became an online sex worker to pay for her insulin. It's the guy who turned his life around in the legal weed industry, but has to deal with cash accounting and risk of robbery, and is unable to access retirement services, because he's forcibly unbanked. It's the person who runs the local community center but had felonies, and has unsavory prison tattoos they keep covered up, that's forcibly unbanked. Your "muh consequences" destroy people's lives, people who are just trying to survive, and doing so by participating in legal activities in their own communities, and by saying, writing, and sharing things which are legally protected.
You can always justify "muh consequences" when you create a boogeyman to target it at, but the reality is that free speech that is not free from life-altering consequences meted out by global institutions with near unlimited power /isn't free/. Freedom of association for businesses stops when the business is nearly more powerful (or maybe actually is more powerful) than the government. It's still oppression and it's still immoral, even if it's not the government doing it.
It is also true that there exists behaviors that are unacceptable, socially.. but that should not be illegal. I can lie all I want in most cases, legally, but there are social repercussions for that. I can treat people disrespectfully, but it might cause them to no longer interact with me.
There absolutely MUST be cases where actions have social repercussions, but are not actually illegal.
That being said, I totally agree that freedom of speech is a social construct that goes beyond just the law. And the impacts on someone for their speech has grown more and more out of hand over time.
Absolutely. Social repercussions are not the only consequences however, and the "muh consequences" crowd conflates social repercussions (I didn't get invited to the party) with material life repercussions (I had my bank account closed). These are not the same.
Individuals have a right of free association. Small businesses arguably have a right of free association as well. Massive multi-national corporations do not and should not, they are allowed by society their size and breadth so that they serve the needs of society, which includes providing services to every member of the public. You should not be deprived of necessary services for a normal life because of behaving in a legal manner and exercising a legal right.
That's fair.
So, Joe's corner pharmacy should be allowed to kick someone out of their store who's protesting, acting unpleasant, wearing a KKK outfit, or other First Amendment protected activities, but Walgreens shouldn't be able to? Where do you draw the line?
Walgreen's and CVS as a consequence of their duopoly/monopoly position do not have the right to kick you out of their pharmacy and prevent you from getting the medication you need to sustain your life (possibly quite literally) because they don't like the racist slogan on your t-shirt.
If you don't agree with this, you don't agree with freedom of speech, and any further conversation is basically pointless. You don't get to kill people by proxy or make people homeless by proxy because your don't like what they say as long as you can proxy it out so it's not the government literally directly doing it. It's just as unethical as the government warrantlessly wiretapping all Americans by buying data from data brokers hoovered up by FaceGoog, rather than building said system itself directly to skirt the laws.
The Constitution was conceived at a time when the government was the most powerful entity. Modern multi-national megacorps are arguably more powerful, and should be reigned in with similar restrictions.
Since I've entertained your scenario, in your reply to me, I'd expect an acknowledgement that preventing someone access to medication required to sustain their life, due to their speech, is effectively equivalent to killing that person due to their speech. You cannot have "freedom of speech" in a society where you can legally kill people because of their speech.
There's a huge gap between "social consequences" and material life consequences, and this is why "muh consequences" is a disingenuous argument made by people who actually are opposed to freedom of speech, but don't have the balls to say it (ironically, because they have the right to do so, but are afraid of the consequences).
Blanket rules and arbitrary size limits won't work. If you have a blanket rule that companies can kick people out for any[1] reason, then you have your "only one pharmacy in town" problem. If you have a blanket rule that companies must serve everyone regardless of their speech/behavior, then you can't kick a disruptive customer out of your business. If you say life-or-death companies must serve everyone, then you get into the endless debate about what counts as a life-or-death company. We have to eat. Do grocery stores count? Restaurants? We spent 2020 agonizing over what counts as an Essential Business. If you say companies over a certain size (or monopolies) must serve everyone, then you have to set an arbitrary size and debate over whether company X is a monopoly. I don't know what the answer is.
1: Any reason besides discriminating against "protected classes" https://subscriptlaw.com/protected-classes/
Speech discrimination is just another form of discrimination, and whether you can compel an individual acting as a sole proprietor or a family business to do something is a different question than whether you can compel a multi-national megacorp to do something. I don't know that "20 employees" is the line to draw, but it should be obvious on its face that a small business and an MNC are not the same, and they operate in society under different reasonable standards.
If 4 companies owned 100% of the property and in a region (as Visa/Mastercard/Discover/Amex do in the credit card industry) and worked together to limit the rights of people they disagree with to protest, you'd have a better point. That's clearly not the case. When you kick someone out of a store, they have the ability to protest anywhere else, and those are very real alternatives. I can grant you that that still limits the protester's speech to a small degree, but the ability to easily protest in many other ways mitigates the harm of that limitation. By contrast, people that are locked out of payments platforms have no alternative.
Similarly, if Walgreen's and CVS had a total oligopoly on pharmacies and colluded to exclude people based on political views, that would be a strong argument to regulate them.
Similarly, I'm not "harmed" as a Stripe user when an OnlyFans model or someone whose politics Stripe's executives disagree with receiving payments through the same platform. If there is a higher objective economic cost, pass that on through fees and stop trying to force the moral views of a few tech executives on everyone in the country.
They are the same, they merely vary in degree. If my neighbor walks up to me and asks for a loan of $1000 and I say no because my neighbor regularly calls my wife a whore, there are certainly material repercussions to not having access to that $1000 (maybe he really needs it) but it is clearly a social repercussion of his actions. I don't think I should be legally required to give him $1000. Likewise if someone walks into a restaurant and starts shouting "this food is the worst I've ever ate" it should be perfectly legal for the restaurant to refuse to serve food to this person, even though being denied food is perhaps one of the most severe material repercussions one could experience depending on what other options were available. Other people do not know nor are obliged to know your circumstances and what you need. It is your personal responsibility to make sure your needs are met, which includes making sure at least some portion of society tolerates you. If you piss off one bank, bank with someone else; if you piss off every bank, you screwed up.
Everything is a matter of degree, that's not a counter-argument. The issue here is that "social consequences" are a matter of individual relationships, material life consequences are generally a matter of policy. If you find yourself afoul of a banking policy that banks as a group have chosen to take to discriminate against you for lawful speech, you find yourself having material life-altering consequences for your speech.
You are imaging a scenario in which someone is unbanked because one bank rejected them, when in fact the lived reality of the unbanked in the US is that they are unbanked because /all banks/ reject them, or at least all banks they have access to in their community. And it's not as if they've taken specific and directed actions against those banks, in many cases it can be as simple as having priors, which makes it both harder to get and maintain employment, as well as harder to impossible to get banking services. Nearly 10% of the American adult population has prior felony convictions, but once you serve your time it is morally reprehensible to mark you with a scarlet letter that prevents you from getting basic services required to exist in society, like banking.
So sure, someone screws up? Do we damn them forever for screwing up? Is MERE SPEECH enough to damn someone forever? Because that's what we're talking about here. That's the "muh consequences" argument you're making by implication, even if not explicitly.
The way you imagine "consequences" working, is not how it actually works. Your delusion is not reality, and reality is a harsh mistress. We are accountable for the arguments we make and the policy positions we espouse to their actual reality, not to our imagined outcomes.
Be brave enough to just say that you don't believe in freedom of speech, and that you're okay if 10-20% of the population ekes out an abject miserable existence or dies due to their belief system or utterances, because that's the reality of "muh consequences".
Freedom of speech means you're not going to go to jail for what you believe in, you're not going to be fined, no one can legally beat you or invade your home or do anything else to you that they are not allowed to do to everybody.
But the idea that a bank has an obligation to you just because you really need a bank is absurd. If I believe you to be damned forever because you looked at me funny, the government has no right to force me to believe otherwise, because that's what freedom of belief really means. I'm sorry that you live in a real world where being ostracized from society is extremely undesirable, but maybe consider doing things that don't get you ostracized from society. Alternatively, go live alone in the woods. Those are the options we all have.
If you think people should be compelled to endorse the speech of others, then just admit you don't believe in freedom of speech.
Offering a public service does not constitute endorsement of the speech of others. Effectively banning people from a public service as a matter of policy is not about individual relationships and is materially different than the situations you describe.
The only reason the line of reasoning you're putting forth is under discussions is that right-wing christo-fascists almost got Pornhub and OnlyFans knocked off the Internet by putting pressure on Visa and their banking partners.
If you are unable to understand the difference between an individual choosing not to associate with you due to disagreeing with your speech vs being banned from a public service necessary for existence in our society due to some people disagreeing with your speech and manipulating policy, I don't know how to help you.
You continue to conflate two things that are not the same. Yes, public services should be compelled to not discriminate against people because they exercise their legal rights. This is a pretty straightforward argument and you doing a lot of mental contortions to not address my actual argument. Thanks, though, for confirming you're okay for up to 20% of the population to die because they said something you disagreed with.
Once twitter banned trump, suddenly so did all the other tech giants. Once visa banned Wikileaks so did Mastercard. These giant corporations typically act in a block.
And you still can't shout fire in a crowded theater.
You responded like I'm making a Libertarian argument here, but it sounds like you're embracing the dystopian cyberpunk future where Megacorps control the world and can arbitrarily destroy people's lives for things they say, so I'm not really sure you have a grasp on my politics. I don't know what your politics are, but I know that you hate people who say things you disagree with, because you are completely fine with their oppression, up to and including loss of materially necessary services for living their life. Killing people by proxy for uttering something is not supporting freedom of speech, so maybe rather than being snarky and making disingenuous statements you can just come out and admit you directly oppose freedom of speech so we can have a real conversation?
I am perfectly fine with banks being exempted from first amendment rules if the bank has no relation with governments and when the government do not depend on banks to operate the financial system within the nation. Otherwise the bank is just an extension of the government, indistinguishable from a government department.
It may be necessary to revisit the fascist question - we certainly seem to be revisiting the socialist one so horseshoe theory pretty much guarantees we will - but I will not entertain any fascist positions unless the person arguing for it acknowledging that that's what they're doing.
I'll be playing the world's smallest violin for you tonight.
@dang I don't know why you haven't banned this piece of human waste.
edit: I've been flagged for this and yet - the actual neo nazi who supported Anders Breivik killing children continues to post. Is it the official position of Y Combinator that neo nazis who support terrorism are welcome to post here?
>aren’t projected to perform as well
To be clear in my case this was not a managed portfolio. They literally dumped individual shares I had specifically selected and purchased
What kind of account did this?
What you’re describing is a lot of work, when there are higher margins elsewhere. Why would a payment processor build a special system just for porn? If it’s profitable someone will eventually create a product.
My assumption is that they looked into this and decided it wasn’t worth it.
I remember years ago the issue of chargebacks is due to shame and people in relationships denying that they ever did it to appease partners. So it’s pretty hard to be in a business that has to fix shame and relationship problems to succeed. If they could do that, they need to release it as a psychology tool.
But you don't. You just have to extend the current system for calls about hitting a limit, fraud, etc.
"So it’s pretty hard to be in a business that has to fix shame and relationship problems to succeed."
You don't have to fix shame. You just need to pre-approve the transaction so they can't later charge back without a compelling argument for why the person on the phone wasn't really you.
In the current system banks as private businesses can refuse service to whoever they want. We don't own even our dollars in the bank, we're a creditors. If the bank fails anything that's uninsured may be lost, because the vast majority is not held in legal tender, it's book money which no other party will accept as payment.
Your story seems extreme, that would not be legal in my country because stocks are your own property, the bank can't touch them. Either way, none of this should be allowed in the first place. The financial system is completely messed up and the only reason people think it's normal is because they don't know any other way. Money itself should be neutral, it should not be controlled by any single group and people should have free access to basic transactions.
If only there were something like a public bank ledger that belongs to everyone...
Feels like proper legislation might also be a solution to the human problem, rather than just throwing technology at things. Maybe both?
Of course, neither may actually be feasible in some places.
Possible compromise:
We try the decentralized public ledger. Then, should that fail, we can still attempt to legislate morality for the... well, darn- I've lost count of the failed attempts but maybe it will work next time.
1) Stick to overcollateralized stablecoins (MAI, DAI, FRAX, sUSD, sEUR, etc.) & Layer 2s (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync). If you're okay with the centralization risks, then USDC & fiat-backed stablecoins can enter into the picture.
2) Account abstraction's an important step in providing the necessary security & recovery features to make it easier to use & secure. One of the parts required was ERC-4337, which has been in the works for some time and was recently publicly announced.
https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-4337.m...
Before the contrarians come in for the quick gotcha and say that it bring in centralization: That's been made painfully aware multiple times over. However, Vitalik's 2021 post on social recovery wallets puts it best:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
> One common response to suggestions to use any form of multisig, social recovery or otherwise, is the idea that this solution goes back to "trusting people", and so is a betrayal of the values of the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. While I understand why one may think this at first glance, I would argue that this criticism stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what crypto should be about.
> To me, the goal of crypto was never to remove the need for all trust. *Rather, the goal of crypto is to give people access to cryptographic and economic building blocks that give people more choice in whom to trust, and furthermore allow people to build more constrained forms of trust*: giving someone the power to do some things on your behalf without giving them the power to do everything. Viewed in this way, *multisig and social recovery are a perfect expression of this principle*: each participant has some influence over the ability to accept or reject transactions, but no one can move funds unilaterally. This more complex logic allows for a setup far more secure than what would be possible if there had to be one person or key that unilaterally controlled the funds.
[1]https://www.heart.org/en/news/2018/10/26/can-daylight-saving...
GP could probably purchase the shares and be issued stock certificates that they could physically own, in which case there would be no chance of a brokerage being able to sell them.
(I'm not disagreeing that the brokerage's action was sucky, mind you)
You legally can hold shares of any company, but you'd have to spend insane amounts of money. Even when companies are acquired the shares aren't actually transferred to the acquirer. One of the custodial companies just merges the shares into the acquirer.
As an example, I used to own a couple of shares of both Apple and IBM. My shares were held directly in my name by computershare, which is the transfer agent for both companies.
When I sold them, someone _probably_ bought them through a brokerage, which means that computer share updated the registration to name Cede & co as the registered owner of the stock, and cede updated an entry indicating that the buyers brokerage owned the shares, and the buyers brokerage updated an entry that said that the buyer owned the shares.
This is irrelevant - a US brokerage cannot arbitrarily trade your shares, whether or not your shares are held in street name.
> GP could probably purchase the shares and be issued stock certificates that they could physically own, in which case there would be no chance of a brokerage being able to sell them.
This is equivalent to suggesting someone put their cash in a mattress rather than using a bank. The real solution is to find a better bank.
Indeed. It seems most people think the Hypothecation agreement on a Margin account is something brokerages can do without having such an agreement on file. They can't.
But you're right, if you care to not trust that, you do have the ability to either get certificates (if they're issued for the stock in question) or do a direct registration (DRS) so they're held directly in digital form at the Transfer Agent. Just of course bear in mind that if you're NOT intent on holding these shares forever, selling at this point can become a multi-day process, so you become a bit less able to react quickly to market activity.
The illegal sex industry is a big one, and if you have a scalable and available online platform that illegal transactions can be hidden from the authorities that is a problem.
It is a problem if your payment processor is taking payments for nonconsensual sex, rape and payments to have sex with children. Not just a moral panic issue.
Edit: seems like I have some views that are unpopular with the cowards who downvote comments without engaging in discussion.
Downvotes are to be expected on that topic as soon as one says something mildly against the prostitution "business"...
"Sex consumers" don't want to take responsibility for the damages they cause or the crimes they participate in, for them it's a "simple commercial transaction" between "consenting adults", forgetting all the coercive tactics pimps have been using for ages, the grooming, the drug addiction...
Of course it's a legal risk for any payment processor involved in that kind of "business".
Don't worry about the downvotes, your arguments are completely reasonable and nobody can silence you no matter how hard they try.
There are sex slaves in America, and anyone that covers for that is worse than a coward.
That ship has long sailed, my friend. We spent the past 7-10 years intentionally drawing corporate America into politics. I mean, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter. Apparently people want it this way, so here we are. This time it's a left-leaning cause that gets screwed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/01/visa-mind...
You're totally right, in this case it's child porn. The lawsuit proves Visa's paranoia isn't entirely unjustified, either. That's the thing that pierces the corporate veil and puts executives in jail. Hence the cut off. I'm not sure how we improve the situation though
> The other day I got a notification that was "FYI we sold your shares in company X (NASDAQ listed)". They've decided they're no longer keen on weed companies and have taken it upon themselves to fix my portfolio to remove such evilness.
You are aware that cannabis is still federally illegal, right?
Amazon's firearm accessory rules seem to contain plausible examples of such. Permitted accessories include:
Vise blocks designed to hold firearms, except for those intended for "assault weapons."
Magazine loaders, except for those which can accommodate the following common rifle calibers: .223/5.56; 7.62x51; 308; 7.62x39; 5.45x39
Armorer's wrenches, except those specifically for assault weapons, particularly AR pattern rifles.
Hand gun grips, but not "assault weapon grips".
Implicitly permitted are jig kits except those for ARs specifically (no mention of other assault rifles/weapons. It bans "AR-specific jig kits")
Source with many more examples, many of them sensible restrictions likely motivated by state laws, but many of them perplexingly specific: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external... Is there any state in this union in which restricts sale or possession of vise blocks designed to hold ARs? Not as far as I'm aware.
They also restrict "Offensive and Controversial Materials", saying:
> We maintain these policies to ensure a welcoming environment for our global customers and sellers to do business while offering the widest selection of items on earth. We promote trust and respect, as well as adherence to the law.
> We exercise judgment in allowing or prohibiting listings and we keep our global community of customers and cultural differences and sensitivities in mind when reviewing and making a decision on products.
One of the examples of products they ban is "Products that promote intolerance based on race, religion, and sexual orientation.", which interpreted in an impartial manner would obviously ban the Bible and many other religious texts, but in fact Amazon doesn't actually ban those. They're exercising a lot of judgement in the application of these rules and many apparent contradictions can be found. For instance they claim they won't sell products which promote or glorify terrorism, yet they sell the Unibomber's Manifesto and t-shirts of Che.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
People widely applauded Visa et. al move, as this Gab guy is a horrible person that ends each message with dreaded "Jesus is King" quotation. So "the people" was happy.
Now people learn the hard lesson, one day your opinion, business, etc. might irritate the powers that be and you'll be crashed, as those who you helped to crash before.
Let's this be the lesson for everyone.
Not quite.
Where free speech is concerned, if we don't fight for each other, we are our own enemy.
If one of the golden age characters can be patriotic about limits of free speech, I think you can figure out that middle ground too.
I'd rather have that shit out in the open instead of festering somewhere hidden.
How controversial is it to say "genocidal calls for violence should be frustrated by any means necessary, including force"? If Captain America decides to suddenly do a 180 and police the one-drop rule you have my permission to deck him in.
Tolerance is something that should be extended to everything but intolerance. We fought an entire global war about this, but took the wrong lessons when all the major players in the Third Reich got promotions to the UN, NASA, etc.
Gab is a cesspool of hate speech up to and including people using it to advocate things like treating Jewish people like livestock, holocaust denialism, and being used to coordinate conspiracy theories and harassment of innocent people and individuals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
“What if your opinions become deemed unacceptable?” “What do you mean? My opinions are acceptable.” “But what if one day they aren’t?” “They are though. Why do you keep saying they aren’t?”
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
- Martin Niemöller
Nothing to do with "morals", everything to do with the risks associated with prostitution. Same thing with Cannabis businesses, which payment processors tend to not do business with.
These companies have very little morals, but their executives don't want to be thrown in jail for being digital pimps.
Yet we have figured out how to let 16-year old kids drive 5,000-pound blocks of metal in public.
The distinguishing element of the two cases is morality. (Substitute porn for prostitution to sidestep the question of legality; the result is the same.)
I don't want the government to legislate morality. Everyone in a free society should have the choice to be moral or immoral; otherwise there is no morality. But if the U.S. government wants to effectively eliminate cash through post-9/11 KYC/AML laws, structuring laws, increasingly strict service-industry cash-transaction reporting requirements, and so on, then either the government needs to establish a genuinely amoral and private electronic-payment system that allows disgusting, vile, reprehensible, but legal transactions. Or the government must actively affirm the obligation of private payment processors like Visa and Mastercard to support transactions that conflict with their moral preferences.
Our freedoms of speech and association are being swept aside as the government shunts nearly all financial activity through private enterprises. What good is the Bill of Rights if you can't do anything without a debit card?
It isn't a circular argument, running a business is all about risks management, choosing not to do business with people that could be link to sex trafficking mafia is very much effective risk management, that platform can go take their business elsewhere.
This isn't even a partisan issue, prostitution is frowned upon by most payement processors for very objective reasons. It's a non story.
Of course society should indeed profess the meagerest moral rights and humanity for all and protect that.
So I donated BTC, and this is when I realized why we need crypto despite all the scams.
Self-sovereignty and self-custody prevent third-parties from making decisions for you like this, and the removal of intermediaries (like payment processors) also prevent anyone from restricting you ability to transact with your desired counterparties.
The kind of freedom this enables also has disadvantages of course, but I strongly believe the few real "bad" transactions that gets blocked by the current system are a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of people deprived of access to the system and the millions of others who are included but seriously limited in what they are "allowed" to do on it.
It is just a convenient way to convert the crypto to fiat that these processor handle for their customers. There are ways to handle this step without a third party (P2P exchanges are one).
Less convenient for sure, but ultimately if you care about your economical freedom you will adopt them... or you will live in a walled garden, at least as long as your activity fits the current agenda/policies of these intermediaries (and your government). As soon as you don't, you get kicked out/cut from the system, even if your activity is not illegal.
A closer comparison would be to a bank that doesn't let a you deposit the cash your business earned at the end of the week. It would be an annoyance, but it doesn't actually prevent you from conducting your business.
Except that, as we have seen, Bitcoin rarely is used for "we need financial freedom" activities and mostly for "buy into my Ponzi scheme" activities.
Someone could have constructed the crypto equivalent of PayPal. Someone still could and maybe right now is even better since the Ponzibros are getting hammered.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing it. That speaks volumes.
[1] FOSTA/SESTA https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=FOSTA-SESTA&usesk...
I'm pro-BLM but learning Silicon Valley Bank gave BLM millions of dollars before it collapsed rubs me the wrong way.
I need my banks and financial institutions to do their primary job first and foremost. I'm getting to the point where DIE marketing is become a signal of poor upper management trying to hide failures.
Basically the Claremont Institute tallied up announcements of corporate charity that went to anything related to racial minorities, and called that "giving to BLM and supporting riots."
This isn't a moral judgement so much as it is an attempt to avoid association with high fraud risk transactions, which lead to more chargebacks, potential implication of the bank in criminal activity (e.g., money laundering), and greater government scrutiny under initiatives like Obama's Operation Choke Point.
A large segment of the population unfortunately have extremely distorted moral compasses, and a disproportionate number of them likely work in conservative industries such as finance.
Americans on average consider pornographic actors to be more immoral than lobbyists, spies, and lawyers, and second only to politicians. I'm not surprised at this chart but it really depresses my spirits.
Some industries get to get away with making a lot of their own decisions there and just shooting themselves in the foot if they feel like it, but with the thick regulations in the capital markets, this sounds like an overreach. They can kick YOU off the platform, but even when doing that, they typically need to leave your securities alone in an account that you still get to choose when to sell.
And thus processors should be required by law to provide service to everyone unless they are clearly doing something illegal, and even then, it's a matter for the police and courts, not private corporations or individuals.
[1]: https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/human-rights
And I think this is also targeted at pornography? I'm not sure where USA is in the pornography rankings, but I'm fairly sure it's nowhere near the bottom (sorry).
But the point is, even if it were all illegal, that's probably a matter for the police, not for private interests to deny an essential service 'just in case', or because 'we don't want to do business with those people' , etc.
There's a clear difference between 'aiding and abetting', and the much vaguer 'facilitating', 'supporting', which could be true of phone, or electricity companies for example.
But I believe those companies are required to provide service, as they are 'utilities'.
That's hard to convert from real money -> random crypto -> real money. There are lots of legal and trust issues.
I wonder why they didn't use a more established crypto like bitcoin or ethereum and invented their own instead.
I'm guessing, because bitcoin never worked. Never provided the anonymity it promised. Became just another currency, regulated by whatever random public exchange you signed up for.
At a small scale, there are a lot of options to go around it and also avoid KYC, but it's not really a viable solution for a company. They have to work with a bank or another payment processor to convert the crypto and/or manage whatever traditional currency the crypto is converted to. A few years ago, there was a wave of large company accepting crypto (eg. tesla), but most of them have backed down from it.
It's like accepting gold coins as a payment for your company. You can't pay your taxes or wages with those even if they have a stable value.
I wonder if they could go direct to Wyre’s old payment processor?
In the end it is the credit card industry who dictacte what is and is not allowed to be paid using their system. If they shut you off you are basically fucked..
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...
Imagine if banks cut off access to MAGA, or the GOP, or scientology, or Greenpeace?
More regulation needed
Oh Ameen is also working on Tornado Cash, https://twitter.com/ameensol is that part of his sex work?
Also no comment on the fraud/chargeback rate in Spank's transaction flow.
I thought cash is king in the sex worker world.
I don't know how we let them get away with this. Facilitating commerce should 100% be a government operation and be free. To accept cash I pay paying the US government a fraction of a percent I'm taxes compared to credit card fees.
The fact that, on top of all this, they are essentially policing what can and cannot be sold and bought should be outrageous to people. It's a complete conflict of interest that companies can shut down payments to and from competitors to their investments.
People can say "oh just don't use or accept visa etc" but good luck staying in business or buying anything online.
We absolutely need some kind of government backed digital payment system in my opinion. Credit card rewards should also be illegal they are nothing but hidden fees passed to you by charging the business more.
To be clear I’m not passing a moral judgement on sex work - just pointing out the fact that it’s presently illegal in many forms and jurisdictions and that fact is relevant.
Going to put them out? Probably not. Can they? Absolutely.
Forget transactions, they collect a tax on almost all money in the economy. Something like 97% of money in circulation is simply bank loans (like mortgages) that haven't been paid back yet.
I encourage anyone to walk around a financial district somewhere and really think about what it's all for. On the inside of some of those buildings there might be people, but they aren't doing much. On the inside of many there aren't even any people.
Finance definitely has value, but is it really that much? It's a fraction of what they take.
How they get away with it is the interesting part. There's just something about money. There will always be a very large part of the population who just don't get it. Then there are some who excel with it. It brings out the worst in many and it downright scares the rest. All that's clear is we need to get a grip on it. Bitcoin was the latest attempt.
I can't recommend enough the book Other People's Money by John Kay.