Jiro
14hr ago
It's OK for a 20 year old woman to take a loan or a job from a 60 year old man, but not to have sex with him?
For most normal human beings, sex is tied up with emotion in such a way that these other things are not.
Jiro
14hr ago
I would argue that it should be in the interest of anyone who dislikes sex slavery to have legalized (and somewhat regulated) prostitution instead.
By this reasoning pretty much everyone should be in favor of legalized-but-regulated rape too. (Or legalized, regulated, bank robbery.)
Jiro
1d ago
In D&D, drow are evil by culture anyway, not inherently evil. Good drow were prominent as far back as Drizz'zt was introduced, which is 1988.
Jiro
1d ago
If "stuck at the lowest levels" doesn't include a range of capabilities, it would be impossible for black people in those positions to be more functional than white people, unless being more functional doesn't affect their ability to do the work at all.
If "stuck at the lowest levels" does include a range of capabilities, then it is possible for the lower level to have a different distribution within that range for blacks than for whites, so blacks having higher IQ is still possible.
Jiro
2d ago
My working hypothesis for that would be that for socioeconomic reasons, black people in those jobs would include more higher IQ workers than white people in those jobs, so the blacks actually do have higher IQ.
Jiro
2d ago
You brought up the Chinese person.
What makes it good is that the government of China is not subject to the free market. It's a government; it collects money by force, it controls what people do on its platform using the threat of force, and it performs actions (such as espionage) that wouldn't be very useful to a company that only made money by voluntary transactions.
Jiro
2d ago
I think that's quite outspokenly anti-trans (or at least against the mainstream of trans activism
It's buried inside a big post and a lot of obfuscatory verbiage. The point of saying something like this is to communicate it to others. Saying it without communicating it may as well be not saying it, even if some Internet weirdos might parse it mechanically and figure it out.
Jiro
2d ago
Namely that there's a profound difference between a person who is 60 IQ in a population where that's the norm, versus someone who is 60 IQ due to disease in a population with an average of 100.
I believe at least one person (maybe on dsl) responded with "No, I've worked with them and most of their inability is due to IQ, not other disabilities". The problem is that it's easy to say this, but it's much harder to prove it or even give reasonable evidence for it. On the face of it, it looks like special pleading to explain away what would otherwise be pretty good counterevidence.
Jiro
2d ago
Singling out an owner doesn't make it automatically good, it makes it good on a case by case basis, and the Chinese person wouldn't qualify.
Jiro
4d ago
A cartel is not a country. If you go to war against a country, civilians are going to get hurt, because that's what going to war against a country is like. You can't avoid it without opposing all wars. And you especially can't avoid it when your enemy deliberately puts civilians in the line of fire.
Jiro
5d ago
It's only coercion in the sense of coercing the person who is directly doing harm. It's not coercing the pavement owner because the pavement is usually not private property and even if it is, forbidding the bum wouldn't impose costs on the property owner.
Jiro
5d ago
It's an alternative, but it's not a non-coercive alternative. It's a differently coercive alternative. Still coercive.
Sure, assume that sex is the worst thing in the world that any employer will ask you to do,
It pretty much is, because some employers are very motivated to ask for it and most employees value very very highly not having to give it. Humans are like that. There's nothing comparable except maybe for some extreme forms of dangerous working conditions.
I'm trying to get a proper explanation of women's power of consent in an employment context.
A definition of consent that captures what most people mean by "consent" excludes cases where failing to "consent" results in a high cost imposed by the party asking for consent. You can try to claim that nobody owes you a job, so the employer hasn't imposed a cost by firing you, but if the job isn't sexual and the demand for sex is suddenly sprung up, the employer has committed fraud. Not committing fraud and not imposing costs through fraud is something the employer owes the employee.
Jiro
5d ago
I would hope that if American citizens are fighting back against people who are shooting rockets at them, we wouldn't punish those American citizens.
Jiro
5d ago
My proposal isn't making anyone do anything.
"If you don't do this, we will take some money from you at gunpoint" is making people do it.
But the perceived or actual unpleasantness of any given task isn't for you or I to opine on. It is for people making the deal to decide whether they want to accept the deal or reject it.
On the contrary, the unpleasantness of the task is exactly what's for us to opine on. If we're going to have the concept of right and wrong at all, how much people are harmed is going to be important, and how unpleasant the task is is directly related to that.
My question is and remains: why is sex the one part of the deal for which women/employees apparently lose all ability to utilize their agency and make logical cost-benefit analyses?
Because sex is a really really unpleasant task to take on in this context and many employers are also highly motivated in the real world to demand it. This combination is pretty much unique to sex.
Jiro
6d ago
Isn't it genuinely considered wrong for a boss to order their employee to do something that's wildly out of their job description?
I feel like this is a very urban-corporate-PMC attitude towards employment, where many small business owners take more of an attitude of "I'm paying you for eight hours of your time, during that time you do what I tell you to do." If that means helping with putting up Christmas lights at the owner's house, that's your job description today.
The problem isn't really "it's wildly out of your job description", it's "it's wildly worse than your job description".
Putting up Christmas lights is not so distasteful a job that few people would do it (at least without an orders of magnitude pay increase if at all). Having sex with your boss is such a distasteful job.
Jiro
6d ago
Why not simply relinquish the silly ban on paid public toilets and enforce the law as it exists?
Because political forces that want to accommodate vagrants won't let you enforce the law as it exists.
Jiro
6d ago
Once there are plenty of places where one can empty one's excretory organs without spending anything, it will be much more justifiable to take strong measures
If it turns out that political considerations keep you from doing those strong measures, will you give the businesses a refund on their taxes? My guess is no.
"Part one: hurt people by making them do X, part 2: ameloriate the harm from part 1" is a terrible idea because it's easy to say you'll do part 2 without actually doing it. The most charitable scenario is that you're too optimistic, but in the real world sometimes people just lie about part 2 so they can get part 1,
Jiro
6d ago
The world is full of people who have a pro-outgroup bias, and probably always has been. In-group, out-group, far-group dynamics are not exclusive to Europeans. Asians who prefer whites, Africans and Arabs who prefer European institutions, so on and so forth.
I think most of these either aren't about the same subgroups of each category (some Africans prefer European institutions, others want to kill the Boer) or they're about the fargroup part, not about the ingroup part.
Jiro
7d ago
Could one put a lid on "dentist caused cosmetic damage, courts awarded more in damages than the patient will earn in a lifetime" scenarios
I don't see what's wrong with such scenarios. By your reasoning, if someone was retired and a dentist ruined their appearance, the dentist should have to pay nothing at all. Or if the dentist harmed someone with a childhood disease who won't live to their income-earning years. And even if they had income it would be better to harm a poor person than a rich one.
You might argue that if someone stands to make a lot of money from their appearance, the dentist has done additional damage, but that's just an additional amount of harm that is done by something that causes a base amount of harm to everyone, and it wouldn't consider all income, just appearance-based income.
So now the claim, or at least a pathway for the introduction of obfuscation, is that the employers of high-earners pay more to their employees than the employers of low-earners because the employers of high-earners have lesser utility of dollars? McDonalds Corporation likely has little utility with respect to a given dollar, yet their burger-flippers aren't exactly getting splashed in cash.
It is true that dollars are worth a lot to employees, and are worth little to McDonalds. But employees and McDonalds are also on opposite sides of the transaction.
Employees accept jobs which pay very little because they value dollars a lot. "Dollars are worth a lot" compensates for "it's few dollars". McDonalds has jobs which pay very little because McDonalds is on the other side of the transaction, so "it's few dollars" is not something they need to compensate for--it's something that's already good to them. The fact that dollars are not worth much to McDonalds just makes it better.
I hardly doubt you'd quibble if someone remarked, "The paintings owned by Group B are less valuable than those owned by Group A."
Comparing paintings usually takes place in a context where comparing dollar values is useful. If you tried to make an economic argument where the distinction between "costs more in dollars" and "is more valuable" actually mattered, then you could no longer just compare the dollar value of the paintings.
Why might such a person own fewer dollars?
... we could say, this low-earning person's time is less valuable than that of higher-earners.
No, you couldn't say that. The low-earning person's time is less valuable than that of high earners, in dollars. Treating it as less valuable in utility is circular reasoning, since you're using it to justify treating dollars as like utility.
People can value $x more than their unit of time because
- they don't value their time much compared to other people or
- they value dollars more than other people
The argument for congestion pricing depends on #1, not on #2, and in fact there's a motte and bailey here where the motte is "they value their time less" and the bailey is "they value their time using a smaller dollar amount" (which is not the same as valuing it less).
The dollar comparison reflects the notion that the employers of the working class value the employee's time less than the employers of their employees who earn more per unit of time, skin in the game and all.
The employers are paying in dollars too, so claiming they "value the employee's time less than" their own bosses has the same problem--they value it less when measured in dollars, not when measured in utility (and especially not in utility to the employees).
The utility comparison has very obvious failure states. Namely, utility monsters.
But the argument that poor people "value their time less" implicitly assumes that you're comparing utility already, so you're stuck with it. There's no reason to care that they value their time less in dollars if dollars aren't proportional to utility.
Fiirst of all, yes.
Second, the whole argument should start with "is such a thing as exploitation at all?" A lot of the extreme rationalist arguments on this subject aren't really about sex, they're about the idea that exploitation isn't real unless you're forcing someone at gunpoint.
If you believe this, it's an extreme minority position among pretty much everyone that isn't a weird Internet guy, and really needs to be defended on its own terms, not taken for granted.
If you don't believe this, you should lay out exactly what you do think counts as exploitation before trying to argue that something can't be exploitation, especially based on a principle that you don't believe anyway.
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