The 1957 issue of Life that includes the first coverage of Psilocybin Mushrooms in the Western World also has an advert for a local KKK sponsored baseball team. Wild.
> "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" is a 1957 photo essay by amateur mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson describing his experience taking psilocybin mushrooms in 1955 during a Mazatec ritual in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Tabula Rasa Ventures | Remote ET | Head of Media & International Events | Full time | tabularasa.ventures
Im the Founding Partner of Tabula Rasa Ventures an Investment firm focused on psychedelic therapeutics. If you're interested in breaking into the world of VC through your expertise in Media and Events management this is a perfect role.
> In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.
Last words of the almost-cliche community organizer surrounded by dormant accounts: "Network effects will result in sufficient (grant) funding"
Business model examples that may be useful for building and supporting sustainable communities with clear Missions, Objectives, and Criteria for Success: https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324
Most folks have been reading about the psychedelics renaissance.
A humongous problem is the absolute lack of data that many psychedelic assisted therapists, guides, spiritualists have, to be able to point to their specific types of therapy as effective.
You come across folks that make humongous claims about the specific modalities they use, but don't track the progress of their patients and therefore don't have the data to prove it. We're working with volunteers at Tabularasa.ventures to develop some simple applications to both screen clients and also allow for practitioners or individuals to record progress (reductions in depression, PTSD, etc.) over time whether treating with microdosing, self administered, or more standard psychedelic assisted therapy (PAT) methods.
This is by far the most comprehensive and quantitative report we've seen. Our firm is also working on publishing industry insights: tabularasa.ventures/research
Considering that vasectomies are completely reversible you're just giving people a safer form of birth control that they can opt out of any time. It's not about not trusting people. It's making individuals lives easier through the implementation of a default that allows for people to make more conscious decisions.
But porn doesn't have high margins. No one (except the large distributors like Mindgeek - Pornhub, Redtube, YouPorn) is making much money. Especially these small sites that are being built. After you subtract legal, production, performer fees you're left with almost nothing.
I worked in the Adult Industry for several years, but building tech for the industry wasn't financially stable for me so I had to leave. Still really passionate about the sex worker community though. Porn performers/activists are the kindest, sweetest, most intelligent group of folks I've ever worked with.
Maybe we can start a small group of engineers who want to discuss working through some solutions together. My email is hello@marik.io if anyone is interested.
Should we consider banking a disreputable industry because of actors like Goldman Sachs? Should we consider mining a disreputable industry because of the deaths and cover ups? How about human trafficking for diamond mines? Should we consider the jewelry industry disreputable? How iPhone productions and Foxconn? Seriously the list can go on, every industry has parts of it that are less than reputable. If you think porn is somehow worse, that’s because of your morality or religions beliefs and not the facts.
> Should we consider banking a disreputable industry because of actors like Goldman Sachs?
And Wells Fargo. And Bank of America. And HSBC. But yes, any one of them is enough.
Mining is disreputable because of endemic pollution externalities and worker safety violations. Jewelry is disreputable from cartelization and the FUD regarding synthetics. Foxconn is disreputable because of worker suicides and the Chinese government's apparent political interest in advancing its high-tech manufacturing by any means necessary.
Prurient businesses are disreputable for several reasons, and one of them is the self-reinforcing reason that they are forced into using grey-market payments processors, because their industry is disreputable with respect to customer payments fraud.
So you don't purchase gemstones as investments, you don't let Goldman Sachs handle your IPO without a lot of scrutiny and supervision, and you don't trust the clay lining under the mine's leach pond. And you don't let adult entertainment businesses do card-not-present transactions. The industry attracts bad actors because there's money in it, demand is high, customers have their respectability masks off, and it has less personal accountability than other types of work.
The businesses that have a reputation problem regarding its suppliers getting paid reliably are going to have the worst problems. Everyone else can clean up their problems with lawyers after the fact, with the money they have already been paid, but if your problem can prevent you from getting paid in the first place...
Goldman Sachs never has that problem. Ensuring they always get paid first is apparently part of their culture. That's why they're always the ones making out like bandits while everyone else is dropping like flies. They might stab you in the back, but they won't ever fold up and collapse underneath you. Their office will always be open to accept your civil complaint or welcome the regulator/examiner or government's attorney. And their corporate executives will always be eager to repay your Secretary of the Treasury nomination, or seat on the Fed board of governors, with truckloads of hard money and soft money to support your political campaigns. They might not be reputable, but they are respectable.
Prurient business lacks even that, for the very reasons you mention. If you don't have the respect, you will never get the reputation, no matter how reliable you may be.
From my limited experience talking to people working in this space, the violence / human trafficking portion is not really a problem in the adult entertainment space. At least, many models definitely work voluntarily. I think trafficking is more of a potential issue at the shady ends of prostitution.
The downside of the adult entertainment industry is that you did hear of tales of questionable employers... it's less "violence" and more environments and/or tactics that sometimes seemed shady or unethical. There was also tales of drugs, sure. Also the pay is often relatively lousy. IMHO your best bet to avoid shady places is to support models / producers / etc. at an individual level, which is more possible these days thanks to the Internet.
(To be honest the industry it reminded me of the most is the music industry. Which has similar bits of shady employers / work environments here and there, similar drug issues, similar lousy pay, and a similar scenario where the best way to avoid the shady parts is directly supporting the non-shady artists and venues as much as possible.)
> I'm finding it difficult to believe this given that it's known that pornography is known to be an industry riddled with violence, hard drugs, human trafficking and so on and so forth.
Known by who? Source?
> Edit: As soon as I posted this I see the other commenter outed you as having an inherent benefit from tricking people into believing pornography is a reputable industry.
What are you talking about? I see nothing like this anywhere in the comments section.
