Autism diagnosis does not really focus on social interactions. Difficulties in social interaction are a side effect but it is not how they diagnose the condition.
Can you cite a reference to a diagnostic tool for autism which doesn't "focus on social interactions"? The DSM-5 certainly seems to indicate that social interactions are important diagnostically (excerpt below):
"""Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, as manifested by the following, currently or by history...
Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity...
Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction...
Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships...
"""
DSM-5 criteria for ASD have as criterion A "Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts". So if one doesn't have persistent deficits in social interaction, one doesn't meet the criteria for ASD. So this is a core part of the diagnosis of the condition, it is a mandatory requirement for diagnosis.
I have gone through the autism diagnosis process myself, it is very flexible so as long as you have the stereotypical problems with social situations they will give you a diagnosis if you want it. I didn't want it so they didn't give me a diagnosis. I guess if there were parents involved who wanted something to blame they would have pushed for the diagnosis though.
Most (like 90% or more) autistic people are low functioning. But they are completely invisible to people like you. When you hear the word you think of the border line cases that fall under the label "high functioning autism".
But the author is not limiting himself to just these borderline cases.
Do you have any data for this distribution? This is the first time I've heard someone suggest any particular shape to this distribution, much less that it's shaped as you suggest.
I published this paper recently (1) in Biological Psychiatry. I bring it up only because unlike most neuroimaging research, we are able to image children at all levels of disability (since we image them while asleep). We argue that the idea that there is early brain overgrowth in autism followed by a period of regression or normalization of brain volume does not appear to be true, and the apparent differences in cross-sectional research are due to biases in most studies against including harder to image individuals with autism. In any case, intellectual disability is not 90% but it is quite substantial.
I don't know about these precise numbers, but ~57% of autistic people have an <85 IQ (cf. 16% in general population), and somewhere between 25% to 50% are nonverbal. So 90% may be too high, but it seems very likely that a solid majority has profound difficulties in life.
Note that these numbers are for autism diagnoses, not autism cases. Someone with profound difficulties in life is far more likely to wind up with an autism diagnosis than higher-functioning autistics that are more likely to figure out successful adaptations.
The argument holds no water and it is pretty disgusting of this uber-for-porn pimp to pretend he is doing good.
Porn is like weed. If you want to consume it ethically you need to verify your sources. These cam sites have their own serious exploitation issues that are completely being ignored.
If you go on reddit you can find many threads discussing cam girls who are suspected to either be underage or be literal sex slaves.
There are actual ethical porn producers of various flavours (also featured on HN quite a few times). Onlyfans is not one of them.
Not all porn is created for sale. Modulo all the revenge porn stuff... there’s plenty of people creating their own “personal” porn. From candid selfies shared only with a partner to full on private amateur movie collections.
The article is not exactly sympathetic to the "virtual pimps":
> Like many industries that rely on talent that is often young and naive, greedy middlemen (almost always men) who control production and channels of distribution take all the upside for themselves. A perfect example is porn mega-name Mia Khalifa, who was paid a grand total of $12,000 for only a handful of shoots - a tiny, tiny fraction of the value her content has generated for distributors like Pornhub.
Nonetheless this problem is not unique to porn. We don't criminalize Patreon, Medium, Spotify, PayPal, or Visa. We probably should, but if we're going to start dismantling exploitative business practices on moral grounds, why start with the most precarious workers and not the most entrenched and richest middlemen?
>A perfect example is porn mega-name Mia Khalifa, who was paid a grand total of $12,000 for only a handful of shoots
This specific example is used by the author to illustrate how OnlyFans is better for performers in comparison. OnlyFans performers keep 80% of their revenue and retain the copyright to their material [0]. Operating in the light of day as opposed to in a legal grey area means the copyright actually gets enforced.
New artists and performers get paid less until they have a marketable reputation. That's how the art/entertainment IP industry works, from porn to music to movies to books.
Khalifa is rich now.
Couldn't you say this comment is virtually pimping an idea? What a culturally inflammatory term you've chosen for any service that does anything to help facilitate sex work.
They are literal pimps doing literal pimp work: recruiting young girls, connecting them with clients, and taking a cut of the profit, while keeping control of the whole business.
It is not my fault you are offended.
I would have no problem if these sex workers setup their own site and did their own business directly with their clients. No pimp would be involved then. There would be no recruiting, which is also where I see a big problem. And nobody would be taking a cut.
- Recruiting young girls: Good infantilization here, you mean young women over the age of consent that can decide for themselves what they can do with their bodies? Those women? And how are they being recruited? By demonstrating the value of their service and being an attractive alternative to McDonald's minimum wage burger flipping? Is McDonalds in the burger-work pimping business?
- Connecting them with clients: So basically any communication network is a pimping network?
- Taking a cut of the profit: They are a popular platform like any other, a place where users know to go to find sex-workers, and they are using that platform as a business. Film festivals also act as middle-men in this regard, but does anyone say film festivals are in the "film pimping" business?
- While keeping control of the whole business: I think I need a source on this, are they shutting down OnlyFan creators because they are linking to an external website? I couldn't find anything in their terms: https://onlyfans.com/terms/user-content
Yes in some ideal environment a sex worker and a pimp could have a mutually beneficial relationship. But that is not why pimping is looked down upon. And you made no honest attempt to address the issues that exist in practice.
I suppose that's technically true, but in the same sense you could say that YouTube pimps its content creators, Hollywood pimps its actors, record labels pimp their artists, etc. Do you honestly think every entertainer and content creator should build and run their own company? Most people don't have the skills and ambition to be entrepeneurs, and content creators need to spend their time focussing on, you know, creating content.
Personally, I would love this conversation to move more toward an issue with capitalism in and of itself, which is a much more worthy debate than talking about if the facilitation of sex work is morally justifiable.
If anyone actually has problems with "People exploiting their bodies to functionally exist in society", then please, let me introduce you to this guy called Karl Marx.
> let me introduce you to this guy called Karl Marx.
Despite his feminist leanings Marx himself had a terrible attitude towards sex work and seemed completely incapable of applying his own theories to it.
I would usually direct people towards Silvia Federici's work with some introduction, but I don't believe most people in this thread are engaging in good faith and worth the time.
> if these sex workers setup their own site and did their own business directly with their clients
That's exactly what they can't do. No major hosting providers allow pornographic content; none of the mainstream payment processors will handle the money; no advertisers will run their campaigns to find customers. This is specifically because of moral panic like yours driving anti-pimping regulations.
OnlyFans isn't great - none of these more-than-a-payment-processor-less-than-an-agency platforms are. But if your outrage is truly about exploitative work and not oh look someone's having sex, there are dozens of organizations you should be lining up to take down first.
You seem to have missed a staggeringly huge piece of the picture here:
Clients aren't paying to actually have sex with OF creators!!
I say seem to because I think you're arguing in bad faith. You've already made up your mind and continue to press on hoping you can say "pimp" enough times to draw attention away from the absence of actual prostitution.
This is a bad argument because it tries to divide sex work into "not really sex work" and "really sex work" and then move all moral objection the latter case. Sex work is work and deserves a safe environment and fair compensation whether or not it involves intercourse with clients.
> Clients aren't paying to actually have sex with OF creators!!
You may not be familiar enough with the Sex Worker industry as a whole, but this absolutely can and does happen.
Oftentimes, it is under a plan discussed in private over a secondary channel (Signal or Telegram or Wickr if they're real pros, Snapchat if they are less careful.) Most common scheme I've observed is either you finish the transaction on a side app or purchase a large amount of their video content and it is applied as a 'credit'.
No, this is not what the majority of OnlyFans creators do. But the legitimate sellers and rest of the market provide a smoke-screen for those who wish to do less accepted forms of Sex Work.
Looks like the porn industry is bankrolling a PR campaign to legitimize their business.
It is particularly amusing to see them pretend they are feminists when in truth practically all feminists hate porn.
And I also find amusing the implication that onlyfans is a win for sex workers. Yeah, maybe for the typical porn star it is a better deal, but on the other hand they are also corrupting a lot of young girls that would otherwise have never gone into porn.
To be clear this depends on the drug. Cocaine and heroin are blood-soaked; cannabis, LSD or psychedelic mushrooms not so much. MDMA is probably somewhere in between.
Cartels also deal Cannabis. In Europe, money from Cannabis traffic is then used to set up logistics for bigger operations, like bank heists, prostitution rings, human trafficking and terrorism, and lets not get started about gangs that kill each other and innocent victims when fighting for territory. Illegal Cannabis is as tainted as Cocaine or heroine. That's why it needs to be legalized. Legalization will weaken organized crime.
I have the same exact problem! I wanted to delete my account, just in case, but I cannot login.
I haven't used Paypal in over 10 years.
Their "service" is really not needed anymore.
eBay is in the midst of migrating all seller accounts away from paypal to their own integrated solution. While buyers can still use paypal to pay, as a seller, you no longer have to touch paypal if you don't want to.
On the other hand, you now have to give them your SSN #.
I have recently purchased a number of things on ebay with 'buy it now' and giving my visa card number directly to ebay, in what looks like a very ordinary shopping cart checkout workflow, with no involvement of paypal. No login to paypal and no mention of it. The browser I was doing it from has never logged in to my paypal account and has no credentials cached for it.
Paypal still does the credit card transaction. I know because their black box algo blacklisted me for whatever reason many years ago and I tried that. They have no customer support its just an abyss of a company and you are a statistic. Fine with me because I really dont use Ebay but I remember that.
No, this parent poster is talking about a new thing.
I think the one you're talking about is the previous system, whereas PayPal would be the transaction processor anyway. You'd still get email (receipt?) and other bits from PayPal after the transaction was done.
Now though, the CC processing on Ebay seems to be a non-PayPal version. At least, that's what it looked like today when getting stuff. No mention of PayPal anywhere, which I was pleased with having had a very bad experience with them (PayPal) a week ago.
A lot of e-commerce sites will take PayPal these days. I like to use that vs giving my credit card information. Granted, I prefer to use things like Apple Pay but there are circumstances where PayPal is the only indirect payment form I have in common with a site
The odd thing about privacy.com is that in order to use it, you have to surrender all privacy. You are required to provide them full access to your bank account.
I calculated fuel savings if I owned an EV. I did it for Germany. The fuel savings are basically negligible (it was about 200 Euros per year). This is due to high electricity prices.
In the US at least you can say, I will pay $15k more upfront, but then I will get it back in fuel savings.
But in Europe people drive far less and electricity is significantly more expensive.
That's what they got for stopping almost all nuclear power plants and replacing them with dirty coal and gas power plants (+ much more pollution). And now the power grid will be under even much more strain with EVs...
It's a psychology thing. People feel less if they are sharing a road with somebody who is sitting way higher than them.
Also big cars feel (and probably are) safer (for the occupants).
So now there is a sort of race to for SUV adoption.
I don't have an SUV but I ride a motorcycle and it's true that being able to see over other vehicles is pretty nice, I feel oddly boxed in when I'm driving a car. But of course it's just an arms race at this point, if everybody has an SUV then the same problem occurs.
That being said, driving a small "urban" car in many european cities can be challenging (and parking even more so), I can't imagine that having a big SUV would be more pleasant overall if you live in a city.
