None of the things you're critiquing are intrinsic to sex work and your argument is that it is intrinsically degrading. You made the point that work isn't intrinsically degrading, since you don't consider working in prestigious fields like medicine or law to be, nor do you consider working in physically demanding and less traditionally prestigious fields like garbage collection. I pointed out that sex isn't degrading either, since it isn't, sex is just something people do with each other.
So, since the only things intrinsic to sex work are that you're performing sex as a form of labour it raises the question; Where does the intrinsic degradation lie? In the labour or the sex?
Maus was subject to one of the many ongoing book bannings in the United States and was removed from multiple libraries due to containing "adult content."
There's more than a subtle misogyny to the anti-OF messaging people throw around, not to label the grandparent comment as falling into this issue.
I have seen comments along the lines of "Onlyfans spotted, opinion dismissed," numerous times online under posts/videos completely unrelated to a content creators OF business. The idea that a person is a sex worker and therefore a slut (in a derogatory rather than reclaimed sense) and therefore they and their opinions are worthless, is the unstated logic of this sentence.
The misogyny drips off of the concept of an Onlyfans lessening someone.
Adult content is whatever is deemed to be objectionable and abhorrent to the dominant social group within a culture and that which needs to be censored and hidden from public view. Beyond a desire to "protect the children" from sex, violence, and drugs. It is a desire to hide and suppress dissent around major social issues. It is a desire to label representation of trans liberation and queer lives as adult, obscene. And it is a desire to label realistic representations of history such as Maus and others as unsuitable for children.
This effort is because once labeled adult it is broadly socially acceptable to do anything and everything necessary to hide a concept from public life.
A specific recent example is Itch.io's recent removal of all content labeled adult, stemming from coordinated pressure by Collective Shout. The block has led to the hiding of some content labeled as lgbt, despite not containing adult content or being labeled that way.
I didn't say human life, I said modern human life. At this point, and especially considering the recent pandemic and the lockdowns that lead to large swathes of the public having to work from home, internet connections are a non-optional component of participation in society. Especially as more and more services go digital only, for example bank branches closing in favour of online only services.
However, you're right that ISPs aren't the right target, open infrastructure for the network to operate on is closer to what I meant.
Is this surprising? People have been crying out about the effects of privatisation for years. When basic services mandatory for modern human life like water, ISPs and energy are privatised you end up with funds that could end up going towards investment or towards funding other public services are instead funnelled out towards shareholders.
The generational wealth the UK had in the form of North Sea oil passed off to private interests for their own profit rather than used for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund like the ones Norway has is a perfect example of the sort of backwards situation you end up in. That oil could have been used for the benefit by every member of the UK public and instead is used only for the benefit of the few while the public suffers under outrageous energy and cost of living increases.
It seems relatively straight forward (famous last words) to assess whether actual copyrighted text is embedded within the network. If you can prompt output that includes verbatim extracts when the copyright avoidance post-processing is disabled then you know that it has been consumed.
Of course whether that was purposeful or inadvertently as a part of the larger training set would not be determined but you would know that the text is in there.
When you get down to it none of that matters. The people driving uptake, the actual users, have their lives made easier by the Discord set up.
I think that’s what’s missed here. People take the path of least resistance towards info or participation. It’s not surprising that Discord became the go to in comparison.
Two of your points require users to make new accounts for each service. That’s an active detriment to usability. A major one. The alternative is clicking a link and you’re in with your identity already set up in an app with a nice looking UI with all the features people know. Unless that ease of use is available an alternative just is not going to compete.
This leads to a tragedy of the commons type situation where people trade away genuine long term benefits like discoverability and archiving capabilities because that doesn’t factor into the day to day experience which is what drives actual uptake.
Is this fundamentally different from training a human exclusively on the same and expecting them to advance the field of art by a hundred years? These sorts of progressions in humanity are slow and steady with occasional exceptions that produce leaps.
This is why I am so grateful for GitHub reviews; Being able to group comments to fire off all at once has saved me from this multiple times as I continue reading, realise something, and remove a previous comment.
In fact you reminded me of the technique right now to check the responses and make sure nobody else had already said this!
I love postgres.app, such a great solution. It always bothered me though that https://postgres.app would just 404 whenever I'd go to look up the docs or go to install on a new machine.
Hopefully a few other people have had their lives made a tiny bit easier by the redirect I set up.
So, since the only things intrinsic to sex work are that you're performing sex as a form of labour it raises the question; Where does the intrinsic degradation lie? In the labour or the sex?