She finally gave it up, moved to Texas, and now manages influencer networks.
You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or
lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you
advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction.
But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction.
Which is a good thing! This is an area full of scammers, if you can't set up your business legally, I'm very happy to hear it's more difficult for you to advertise it.
Making drugs illegal does not eliminate demand, but it absolutely curbs it. The converse is also true, for example legalizing cannabis in Canada has significantly increased demand for it [1]. While it's true cannabis use had been gradually increasing for decades prior to legalization, there was a significant spike afterwards which has since levelled off.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/231016/dq231...
The relevant thing that link actually says is that more survey respondents admitted to cannabis use after legalization, the obvious problem being that before legalization they would be admitting to a crime, which will suppress response rates.
The same link also points out that the legalization happened right before COVID and then you have a major confounder because even if cannabis use is actually up, you don't know if it's because of legalization or people turning to cannabis over stress from COVID. Moreover, the reported usage increased during COVID but started to decline in 2023. This implies that either the apparent spike was COVID, or that it was something like media reports about recent legalization acting as temporary free advertising and causing a temporary increase in usage. Neither of those is evidence of a sustained increase in demand.
Meanwhile legal options do cause people to prefer legal sources over the black market, and then you get fewer people becoming addicts because the thing they thought they were buying was spiked with something significantly more addictive by a black market seller. Or the black market products have higher variation in the dose and then customers can't predict how much they're getting and occasionally take more than expected, leading to a higher rate of overdose and stronger dependency-inducing withdrawal.
In the case of cannabis it's been showing to lead to less underage use too. If it's a crime, then selling to anyone of any age is still just a crime. But if it's only a crime to sell to under 18/21 then legal shops will avoid selling to the under age to avoid revocation of their license.
It isn't true, at least not as a hard and fast rule. Post-legalization changes in demand differ greatly per country. It completely depends on contemporary cultural factors of the country in question.
A change in demand post-legalization can absolutely be highly variable across different countries/cultures, but unless you can demonstrate a country that legalized cannabis and saw a decline in demand, then your as of yet unsubstantiated claim does not refute mine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scarne
which were written in an era when most of the gambling in the US was illegal and run by organized crime, Las Vegas was small, Atlantic City new, and New Hampshire the first state to get a lottery. Like prostitution, gambling needs a rather sophisticated criminal network, a parallel system of law-and-order, to be a workable, safe and reasonably fair business. Scarne started out his career, as a magician and card mechanic, as a sort of consultant who could keep games fair.
Blacks in New York City, for instance, ran illegal street craps and ran a lottery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game
quite similar to the "Pick 3" games you see in many states -- the latter got taken over by the Italian mafia.
Gambling has a broad cross-cultural appeal and some people are going to do it no matter how you try to shut it down. In the US we went from having a few centers to widespread "riverboat" and tribal gambling to widespread casinos now to mobile gambling on sports and sometimes the equivalent of video slots.
Of course there is the matter of degree. It's not going to wreck your life to drop $1 on the lottery a week and probably gives you more than $1 worth of fun. If you're addicted though it may be no fun at all. I can totally see where Nate Silver is coming from but I can also see the degenerate who drops 20 bets on a single game on the weekend as well as the person who thinks he is Nate Silver and he isn't. I think the Superbowl is a fair competition by player who are playing their hardest, but it breaks my heart as a sports fan when teams are not playing to win and that's why I can't stand watching the NBA despite loving going to second-tier college basketball games in person.
And for drugs? I remember all the Lester Grinspoon talk about how prohibition is worse than the drugs themselves and that might have been true before 2000 but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me -- but Marshall McLuhan said we are driving by looking in the rear view mirror and of course some people are going to be repeating things that were true in the last century.
Fentanyl is a response to prohibition. If you have to smuggle something it's a lot easier to move 10 kg of fentanyl and cut it with something near the point of sale than to move 10,000 kg of codeine from the point of manufacture.
But then you have street dealers cutting it with who knows what in who knows what amount. They may use a 1000:1 ratio of unspecified hopefully-inert powder to fentanyl but don't mix it evenly so some customers get a 10000:1 ratio and others get 100:1 and become addicted or overdose. Or a dealer has one supplier who was already cutting it 50:1 so they were used to only cutting it another 20:1 so their customers don't complain, but then they start wanting larger quantities and find a new supplier without realizing they just bypassed the one who was pre-cutting it and are now getting uncut fentanyl.
None of that happens if anyone can buy codeine at Walmart. Or for that matter if they can buy fentanyl and know exactly how much they're getting.
Because its an addictive product. See also: gambling.
The bans and strict regulations are the social safety features.
If gambling is illegal then the profits go to organized crime and they don't follow any of the other laws either.
Still kills me to this day Uber and AirBNB running illegal billion dollar operations. I suppose one can at least say Uber mitigates drunk driving tendencies. As far as AirBNB goes, it can rot straight in hell. My hometown is now 20% AirBNB, they ran illegally for many years, and this completely prices out normal folks trying to live near their families.
And the companies in question break the law and then whine and complain like they shouldn't need to face the consequences; like the law shouldn't apply to them because they don't think it's fair.
That being said, I also dont think that civil disobedience means you have to accept whatever harsh punishment whatever authoritarian is using. It is actually ok to avoid those.
Do truly believe this is some protest action by Airbnb? Because I think most of us rightly characterize it as "intentionally breaking the law for profit" and little more than that.
I'm not sure I like seeing their behavior compared to legitimate protests and activist work. That seems rather insulting to the people and organizations who actually take real risks for the public good. This is a silicon valley startup, a VC-funded profit machine disrupting communities around the world by breaking the law. To paint this as somehow altruistic is a novel take to say the least.
A mint we will then need to spend on bribes to ALPA. DoT is almost entirely captured now, so that's less of a problem.
In fact, here's a much better get-rich app / scheme: use AI to find regulatory situations that are both easy to break and profitable to break and where enforcement is usually just done to poor people. The Ubermaker. Why dig a gold mine when you can sell the shovels.
Honest question: why is this line so clear for you?
The line is clear for some people right away. Other people have to see the effects first hand. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and the never-ending line of obviously poor people dropping nearly their entire paychecks on scratchoffs, then buying a case of beer was a formative memory for me. It most states, the lottery is just subsidizing the cost of education on the backs of the poor and uneducated and gambling-addicted so that they don't have to raise property taxes. And that's if the money actually gets spent on education. Sometimes they just turn into slushfunds for pet projects. It's gross.
We're talking about a product built to make people's lives worse while extracting wealth from them that get them addicted as well.
That's most of the products being sold today, you think the most for-profit companies sell things and services in order to improve the world? They're selling stuff because they want to make money, if they can make someone addicted + extract wealth from them, then in their world that's a no-brainer.
That's just not true at all. The fruit I buy is designed to make my life worse? The vacuum cleaner? The lawn mower? The workout equipment? The standing desk for my office? The clothing I buy?
"The proportion of devices which had to be replaced within five years due to a defect rose quite sharply, from 3.5% in 2004 to 8.3% in 2012."
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/press/pressinformation/obs...
Electronics are more likely to be obsolete for technical reasons, but - for example - modern dishwashers and dryers are far more likely to have cheap plastic parts that fail more quickly. Even for brands with premium price tags.
With clothes, fast fashion is designed down to a budget and up to a price. For consumer brands, the more expensive something is the more disposable it is and the shorter its working life.
https://irispublishers.com/jtsft/fulltext/analysis-of-qualit...
* fruit - I can get any fruit anytime in the year, and it seems fine
* vacuum cleaner - my Miele is still running ten years later and still available new
* The lawn mower - the M18 mower cuts great and uses no gas and just works - much better than the previous PoS
* workout equipment - I don't have much here, but my rowing machine is still going strong
* standing desk - the uplift desk seems quite good quality
* clothing - this might be the only one, but even the walmart crap I get is better than the walmart crap from a decade ago
E.g.
- Is it addictive?
- Does it have the potential to destroy lives?
- Does it have the potential to destroy lives in seconds?
- Does it have a strong lobbying mechanism behind it? (n.b. things that are good and nice rarely need someone to bribe people to accept them)
or simply:
- Would you be worried if your child did it?
I think the number of "yes" that you get draws a very clear line.
Sounds like you're implying some sort of mischaracterization of sugar here which minimizes the former in a weird way.
The alcohol mentioned in a sibling comment also ticks the box.
For the sugar, I'd say yes, no, no, yes and "not too much, but I'm keeping an eye out".
Military technology may be an exception as "necessary evil", but also is a bad example because it id not consumer-oriented.
A large number of these literally save people's lives. Anti-biotics, statins, anti-depressives, anti-psychotics, insulin, anti-histamines.
But that's what we have, it's never black & white. Always a process and always evolving.
If people choose to seek out entertainment that’s bad for them then there’s nothing wrong with providing a market for it. It’s on the consumer to know their own limits.
That said, there is a HUGE need for more regulation around advertising, cut off limits and companies recognising users with a problem.
If you take a Bar for example, most barmen will notice you're already drunk as hell and cut you off, probably kick you out if not get you some water etc. It's actually a legal requirement to stop at some point in countries.
Casinos on the other hand, if you are down 99,000 out of your 100,000 with zero hands of games won, that casino is going to plow you with a good time until it has that last 1,000. It's disgusting.
I hate gambling , I've seen its effect on friends of mine and their families. But I would never stop an adult doing what they want, while knowing the risks.
Asking a casino to behave better is never going to work, adding more regulations and stricter licensing might. The fact that betting companies are now allowed to advertise and sponsor sports is an incredible negative step.
Insurance is a tool for spreading risk, and modern society could not operate without it.
What about pharma and for-profit healthcare employees?
You may be right that guns are are corrosive to a democratic society, that's an open debate. But the people who depended on that factory had the rug pulled and real harm was done without any regard to their welfare. And not everyone who depended on the factory worked there, deli owners and dry cleaners, these types of legitimate businesses are damaged when a major employer closes doors.
I suppose I relate this story to you just to show that, there are other people who think like you, guns are stigmatized, and it has a real human cost. We should not be flippant with our neighbor's well being, because we can't predict the turns of fate, one day it might be our turn.
They shutdown because they sold 7.5 million guns that could fire without someone pulling the trigger and 60 minutes exposed it.
And you should know that their building is being converted into a 250,000 sqft AI data center. So it's not like employment is just lost in the area.
Haven't the locals suffered enough already?
Could you expand on this a little bit? Are you referring to the NY SAFE act? I'm seeing a few lines in their wiki page that suggest otherwise:
* In June 2007, a private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, acquired Remington Arms for $370 million, including $252 million in assumed debt.
* Remington filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March 2018, having accumulated over $950 million in debt
* In July 2020, Remington again filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Any reasoning that can justify even an absurdly evil employer's existence is flawed.
We should not keep bad things alive just because jobs depend on it.
It's important to keep these things (almost) in the open, because when they become illegal, criminals move in and people get hurt.
When I was an intern at a big-name, conservative company, one of my friends came from a porn website.
It's good that the law isn't the only line between good and evil. A bit of stigma is a bottom-up way for people to shape society.
If nobody invites you to dinner parties because you run a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading, that's a good thing. It's free alpha for companies doing more worthwhile things.
I think like you argue, society shaping business is good. And some people should really reevaluate what they're going for if that's too much for them.
Now I'm as as free-minded as people typically gets, but both of those are just "entertainment" for me, one is not more "essential" than the other, what exact "human need" does pornography meet that somehow gambling doesn't also meet, since we're not talking about "fun" or "entertainment" here but something else it sounds like.
Boiling Gambling down to just being "entertainment" is a bit too reductionist in my opinion.
For what purpose do you think that industry was indirectly created for, if not to make money from people? Even if it might not have been created with that intent (although I'd still argue it was), today it surely is mainly driven and maintain with the (at least) implicit purpose of extracting money from people, that's literally why we call it an "industry" instead of just a "community".
The original poster has not expressed this correctly, but I assume that the intention was to say that the gambling industry is different from all other industries, not because it extracts money like any other industry, but because it does not return a product or service for that money.
The porn industry is no different from any other entertainment industry and it provides a service for money.
Gambling does not really provide any service, it just exploits the hope of the gamblers that they might gain something by gambling, which at least on average, never happens.
I do not think that one can call the stimulation of this hope of gaining as entertainment. There are some gamblers for which gambling is really entertainment, i.e. they are rich and they do not seriously expect to gain anything, but the majority of the gamblers do not do this to be entertained but because of the irrational hope of gaining enough to solve all their problems.
The problem with gambling is that people often get addicted and ruin their lives due to it.
While that probably can happen with porn I think the likelihood is a couple of orders of magnitude lower.
I mean yes, it is; It’s not a charity. I guess you could argue it tends to do it slower than gambling?
Stigma and regulatory pressure don't always mean the company is evil.
Cause it's made with dill dough :D
(gotta at least have a joke for a friday. its rough for a lot of us.)
(edit: seriously, tough crowd. hovering between -2 and -4. Like, this is a light-hearted joke. Not even insulting anyone, either.)
Talking about good and evil in tech is a slippery slope.
What's worse, working at Meta building products causing addiction in kids, or building an adult content site?
I think there's an argument that Meta is morally worse, yet there's no stigma associated with having Meta on your resume. I find that interesting.
You think so?
Do you think payment providers should act like moral police that decide how the customers can spend their money? If so, do you think Google/Apple/Microsoft should have a say in which apps the users can install? Should ISPs decide which sites the users can access?
The author is saying it explicitly, you can’t flex as normal people do so you have to feed your ego finding different ways such as anonymous posts. Or talking to an stranger being drunk.
Add in crypto and some AI, and there’s a $50m funding round waiting for you.
> Employees join such projects for various reasons. Some realize that the pay is better than in legitimate projects. Others come because they couldn’t find a job where they wanted to, or because they are simply interested in working on something forbidden. And then a good company saving the world will come along and offer them a job, and they’ll leave. Building a stable team from people with this kind of motivation is hard.
I think OP made this whole article up. Everyone that applies for Aylo knows exactly what they're applying for. The pay is below-average because (a) there's not actually a lot of money in porn and (b) there's no shortage of dudes that want to work in it.
Had a recruiter reach out to me the other day from a sports gambling website (one of the major ones, as reputable as you can get in this industry). I heard them out, thinking they would offer above market rate but in actuality, they offered significantly below market rate.
There is a large talent pool who want to get their lives back on track.
Thanks for reading! When writing this essay, I drew solely on my own experience. I’ve often noticed that startups post job listings with misleading job descriptions, especially in stigmatized industries. It’s only after the interview that they reveal what the work will actually entail. Perhaps you simply haven’t noticed such job listings.
It's been a while since I've read article on something like online gambling without feeling like the author was trying to proselytize.
Edit:
I appreciate the human perspective shared by the article, and get the feeling that OP offers a warning of the consequences of working in stigmatized fields. Ofc online gambling (and gambling in general tbh) is a terrible thing that ruins lives.
Why do you think Onlyfans is the reigning platform for what it does.
Not because it's technically superior, or has the best advertising, or any other logical reason you might summon.
It's because they have a sweetheart deal with a payment processor (Stripe).
I put some time into seriously investigating what it'd take to get an adult-content platform off of the ground, here is one of the emails I received from a self-advertised "high-risk processor":
> "Yes, we do have some Payment Facilitator solutions. However, none of these processors will accept Adult content."
If you don't appear to be a casino at first glance, it's a lot easier to find employees, payment processors and advertising networks willing to work with you.
Brick-and-mortar companies (notably Walmart) used the same trick to get tech talent. Having Walmart on your tech resume doesn't look great, having an e-commerce startup called jet.com looks much better, even if Walmart is that startup owner and sole customer.
What I would LOVE to see in the United States in particular is a system where we tax pornography and then plow that money back into sex education in public schools. The state of sex education in the United States is so far beyond a joke it is a travesty.
That said, I also feel a lot of folks who are pro-legislation are quite dishonest about the negative side-effects of legalization. They definitely exist!
Compared to something else that sells a tangible good on the internet, or some ordinary software as a service thing... If you have 10,000 charges to 10,000 different people placed from an ordinary merchant, and you compare that to 10,000 charges from a porno website, there will be a vastly larger number of chargebacks and human-caused fraud disputes with the porno website. It's a continual and ongoing pain in the ass for any credit card processor that does business with such a merchant.
The major processors (stripe and its top competitors) have decided that it is not worth the hassle and are completely happy to cede this niche market to specialists. Basically for the same reason that a car loan through a subprime lending company originated by a "buy here pay here" car sales lot will have a much higher percentage interest rate, because of the risk to the lender, credit card processing for the adult entertainment market will have a much higher percentage fee charged to the merchant to run those cards.
Gambling/betting though? Overwhelming societal damage with basically no upside beyond the ghouls in charge. Regulate this shit to death, tyvm.
It doesn't necessarily have to be harmful for it to be stigmatized by society.
and uncontrolled urban sprawl with no public transit.
I know I will get downvoted for this because it is an unpopular opinion, but this exactly the reason why we need bitcoin as a means of payments without any middlemen involved.
Plus, on-chain transactions would NOT be used to pay 10€/Month subscriptions. The lightning network (a bitcoin layer-2 network) handles transactions instantly and with lower fees. No miners involved in individual payments here (only for channel creation).