Which state/city was it where people were getting parking tickets for parking in their own front yards because of some city ordinance that allowed them to do that.
These things start as protecting a shared resource, eventually they all end up as revenue generation.
"just that trying to regulate it by making it legal is unlikely to improve things."
So government oversight, improved working conditions for the majority employed in the sector, legal liability for employers who fail to protect their employees, STD screening and counselling would in no way improve the lot of the average working prostitute?
It's not an ideal profession but making it illegal simply makes the situation worse for the women involved.
On the front of addictive drugs how's that approach working out? That's pretty much the approach they take it a lot of places. Drugs are still easily available to anyone with cash who wants them. People still steal to fun their habit.
Algeria - Abdelaziz Bouteflika, President of Algeria Angola - Mr. Jose Eduardo dos Santos, President of Angola Azerbaijan - Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan Belarus - Aleksandr Lukashenko, President of Belarus Bhutan - Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, King of Bhutan Brunei - Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu'izzaddin Waddaulah Cambodia - His Majesty King Norodom Sihamoni, King of Cambodia Cameroon - Paul Biya, President of Cameroon Chad - Idriss Deby, President of Chad China - Hu Jintao, President of China Congo, Dem. Rep. of - Isidore Mvouba, Prime Minister of Congo Côte d'Ivoire - Laurent Gbagbo, President of Cote d'Ivoire Cuba - Raul Castro, President of Cuba Egypt - Hosny Mubarak, President of Egypt Equatorial Guinea - OBIANG NGUEMA MBASOGO, President Eritrea - Isaias Afwerki, President of Eritrea Guinea - Lansana Conte, President of Guinea Iran - Mahmoud Ahmadi Nejad, President of Iran Iraq - Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq Kazakhstan - Nursultan Nazarbaev, President of Kazakhstan Laos - Lieutenant General Choummaly Sayasone, President Libya - Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Leader of Libya Myanmar (Burma) - Soe Win, Prime Minister of Myanmar (Burma) North Korea - Kim Jong-il, President of North Korea Oman - Qaboos bin Said Al-Said, Prime Minister of Oman Pakistan - Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan Qatar - Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani Russia - Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, President of Russia Rwanda - Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda Saudi Arabia - King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, King of Saudi Arabia Somalia - Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, President of Somalia Sudan - Omar H.A. Al-Bashier, President of Sudan Swaziland - Mswati III, King of Swaziland Syria - Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria Tajikistan - Emomalii Rahmon, President of Tadjikistan Thailand - Surayut Chulanon, Royal Prime Minister of Thailand Togo - Faure Essozimna Gnassingbe, President of Togo Tunisia - Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, President of Tunisia Turkmenistan - Gurbanguly BERDIMUHAMEDOW, President of Turkmenistan United Arab Emirates - Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan Uzbekistan - Islam Abdughanievich Karimov, President of Uzbekistan Vietnam - Nong Duc Manh, President of Vietnam Zimbabwe - Robert (Gabriel) Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe
From the link you posted, did you even read that? Or do you not use the system you posted?
"The BlackBerry Enterprise Solution offers two transport encryption options, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Triple Data Encryption Standard (Triple DES)*, for all data transmitted between BlackBerry® Enterprise Server and BlackBerry smartphones.
Private encryption keys are generated in a secure, two-way authenticated environment and are assigned to each BlackBerry smartphone user. Each secret key is stored only in the user's secure enterprise account (i.e., Microsoft® Exchange, IBM® Lotus® Domino® or Novell® GroupWise®) and on their BlackBerry smartphone and can be regenerated wirelessly by the user.
Data sent to the BlackBerry smartphone is encrypted by BlackBerry Enterprise Server using the private key retrieved from the user's mailbox. The encrypted information travels securely across the network to the smartphone where it is decrypted with the key stored there."
Storing your private key in 2 places is traditionally a bad idea. Especially when one of those places is in the hands of a company which can be compelled to hand it over without telling you.
If the goal were to simply be able to send data securely between your secure enterprise account and your blackberry then your secure enterprise account should only have your public key with which to encrypt data it sends to you and your private key should remain in your hands and your hands alone. Idealy the secure enterprise account shouldn't be able to decrypt your data at all.
Now this could be for the sake of efficiency since public key crypto takes more cpu cycles but simply put if the US government asked for your private key, lets say they sent an NSL, RIM would be able to give it to them. That is not a secure system. A secure system would be one where only you have your private key and where blackberry merely validates certificates. In which case anyone who wanted to read your communications would have to perform an explicit man in the middle attack after strong-arming blackberry into signing a cert for them.
So to make it genuinely secure you'd have to use public key crypto and let people choose their own certificate service in which case it would be as secure as the cert service and devices themselves.
So you are saying that my private encryption key on my blackberry has been turned over to the US government?
Simply put, if they asked for it then yes, there's nothing stopping that.
Autorun is the only infection vector of Agent.btz, through thumbdrives or through network drives.
If it was not agent.btz then they're being convicted in the the court of ignorance by their own claims. If it really was agent.btz then they deserve the accusations of incompetence.
"and easily detected by anti-virus software both then and now."
And this is the simple reason why no sophisticated attacker would use an already known virus. Viruses are not that hard to write, I'm only a moderately skilled programmer and I've written a couple for the sake of proving I could (never released though).
If you use a known virus that's already infected grandmas computer then the AV companies will know it.
If you write your own with code unknown to the AV companies, even a fairly trivial virus that avoids disrupting the system or moving out into the greater internet can remain hidden indefinitely.
The simple fact that it was detected as Agent.btz at all will tell you that it's not a foreign intelligence service arranging the infection and is vastly vastly more likely to be a simple case of joe blogs plugging a thumb drive into his infected home machine and then taking it back into work. Anyone with a serious goal of compromising specific military systems will roll their own if only to avoid detection. And deniability is a paltry claim, viruses don't come with a "made in" sticker, a custom virus would be little different from the legions of programs created every day by people looking to steal credit card numbers and you're not going to be able to tie it back to whoever created it unless they fuck up.
Actually being ON or OFF makes all the difference. It does spread through the network- using autorun.
Another infection vector: when a clean computer attempts to map a drive letter to a shared network resource that has Agent.atz on it and the corresponding autorun.inf file, it will (by default) open autorun.inf file and follow its instruction to load the malware. Once infected, it will do the same with other removable drives connected to it or other computers in the network that attempt to map a drive letter to its shared drive infected with Agent.atz - hence, the replication.
Did you even read the article you linked?
Any vaguely security conscious and competent network admin disables autorun and has since long before vista. There's fuck all essential uses for autorun more significant than the security threat it of having it turned on.
And so they can either pretend it didn't happen or pretend that they were only defeated by a dedicated and skilful foe rather than by their own ineptitude and laziness.
That is a fair point, people who are pushing the "sex is bad" moral outrage always seem to decide that the services of the sex industry are of zero value to society. But I'd ask how many people who for one reason or another find it hard to establish relationships be it due to disability, deformity or simple social awkwardness don't swallow the contents of their medicine cabinet thanks to the occasional services of a prostitute.
A real loving relationship is preferable and more fulfilling but counter to fairy-tales not everyone gets to have those.
Simply touching and being touched by another human being now and then can do wonders for your state of mind. I've never reached the point where I wanted to go out and hire someone for sex but if I hadn't found myself a girlfriend and for one reason or another had ended up with no realistic prospect of significant human contact I can see how utterly crushing loneliness could have become. And friendly hugs don't fix some kinds of loneliness.
I'm guessing dismemberment, downing or burning to death trapped in a car didn't feature heavily either yet those are very real risks for people working in the very legal areas of timber cutting, fishing or taxi driving. And doctors and nurses have to wear a lot of protective equipment as bodily fluids are a very significant part of their work.
and yet are not. Legal brothels can have STD testing, enforced condom use, security services, enforced counselling for drug use or other psychological problems. And best of all if it's legal then the brothels can be held liable for on the job injuries or infections like any other employer.
Clean? no, flexible hours and reasonable safety? absolutely.
but you go on with trying to section off anything to do with sex and other sinful things and pretending it's special and different from other jobs because sex is involved.
"My point is that I don't think it is possible for the majority of prostitutes to live and work in a safe environment where they will not suffer grievous physical or mental harm even if you regulate the industry. The benefits of men being able to pay for sex and for some women to willingly choose prostitution as an occupation do not outweigh the harm done to the majority IMHO."
So you're not really interested in actual sensible measures of harm but rather the simple fact that you arbitrarily decide that a particular type of service(anything sex related) is virtually worthless and anything to do with the sex industry to be utterly harmful to it's workers.
"My point is that I don't think it is possible for the majority of prostitutes to live and work in a safe environment where they will not suffer grievous physical or mental harm even if you regulate the industry. "
So instead of the majority of them working in regulated brothels with security and a controlled environment and regular STD tests(also giving an even stronger incentive to take as many measures as possible to remain STD free) it should be unregulated and they can all work out on the street. Fantastic idea.
Because all you a achieve by making it illegal is to make the working conditions worse. (any making yourself feel better of course since you also make it less visible so you don't have to think about it) If we could fix the problems that drive people into prostitution we would have long ago. But poverty, drug abuse and plain old wanting a job with high pay and short hours are not things which are going to go away within our lifetimes.
and yet despite that plenty of timber cutters still get crushed or mortally injured. Fishermen still get washed overboard or die of hypothermia before they can be pulled out of the water or reach a medical facility. Pilots still die in crashes and receive unhealthy doses of radiation(if you know how to shield a high altitude plane please speak up). Metal workers still get burned or die from fume inhalation. Roofers still fall. Electricians still get electrocuted. Farmers still get caught on machinery and killed or maimed.
Should we ban Timber cutting because the men who work in the profession are apparently too inept to decide what risks they're willing to take themselves?
In most of those professions there are safety precautions you can take yet most of them remain damned dangerous in the real world.
"The point is that all of these jobs have a realistic chance of being made safe so that people doing them don't suffer unnecessarily."
not really. I imagine that in america the land of litigation the pressure to make the aforementioned workplaces safe is huge and yet they're still dangerous jobs which kill a lot of people each year. And some of those jobs don't even pay very well.
"Anyway, ask any of the charities working with sex workers and they will tell you that the majority of people don't want to do it"
Ask people in almost any dirty unpleasant job and you'll find most of them don't want to do it but end up forced into it because it pays better than minimum wage and they have other problems in their lives. That's pretty much the reason why anyone gets any job at all.
"There is also the issue of women being transported, sometimes under-age, into a country just to be sex workers. When you can't even speak the local language it is hard to get your rights respected."
Which has sweet fuck all to do with legalizing prostitution. people are imported and forced to work as slave labour in factories in many places around the world but that has sweet fuck all to do with legal, regulated, paid work doing similar jobs.
"Regulation tends not to help those people much as regulated brothels have overheads that push prices up beyond what an less than good-looking and possibly unhealthy girl can charge."
Regulation does that to other industries. It forces out those who are least suited to the industry and those who are not safe in the industry.
"Also most jurisdictions require prostitutes to get help for addiction and take regular STD tests which will exclude many."
Wow, you say that like it's a bad thing.
regulating it helps to improve peoples lives,gets them off drugs and requires them to get STD tests. wow, how awful.
Legalisation vastly superior to illegal prostitution. If we could fix the things that drove people into prostitution we would have already. Poverty, drug abuse and plain old wanting money for things are not problems that are going to go away in any kind of reasonable timeframe.
"Running a legal brothel is a good way to find clients for your illegal imports."
Kinda like how my local tobacconist sells heroin and meth in the back room... oh wait, no he doesn't.
"Because if my life is shitty, her life should be even shitter."
So you think a prostitutes life would be better if she couldn't get any clients? really?
It's an unpleasent job which few people are willing to do and for which there is a high demand which as such tends to pay well(unless someone else like a pimp is taking the income).
It's a dirty job. So? There are people in this world who as part of their jobs have to spend all day surounded by human faeces working sewer maintainance with all the dangers of infections that entails. There are people who work jobs where they can lose a limb to a saw blade. Or be crushed in an industrial accident. I know a girl who had a job where one of her duties was to put down the animals at a lab which used animal testing, think that has no psychological ramifications? My father at one point worked in a slaughterhouse cleaning the grizzle, blood and brains off the walls and equipment. any psychological ramifications there?
There are high class office jobs where conditions are better, but unless the person happens to be skilled and lucky enough to land that kind of job they're not going to get those.
But sure, if sex is in any way involved then its special and it can't be considered in a reasonable adult manner.
pretty much every living organism on the planet tends to increase it's population exponentially when provided with excess food and a reasonably livable environment until it either runs out of food or screws up it's own environment and humans are no different.
you on the other hand are making some stunningly shaky assumptions that a trend in the rate of growth will continue indefinitely into the future or only turn around when it's convenient.
Or even worse, someone who simply does not understand that even if you're sued for something someone else did because they got the name wrong you can lose by default if you ignore the letter sent to the wrong person.
it's not even vaguely fair or logical except to someone who's been hanging around with lawyers too much.
So if I sue the crotchety old illiterate farmer, who hates the guberment and is most likely going to throw any letters in the bin, for something he didn't do I can get a default judgement and take his farm? sweet!
problem being that living things tend to evolve. If a random mutation produces a strain that doesn't bother spending any of it's energy on fixing nitrogen unless it gains some big advantage from it the new strain will out-compete the old one.
it's not as big nor as immediate a problem as it was believed to be 50 years ago but exponential growth is still exponential growth. And even if the most developed countries are not suffering the same problem the vast majority of the human race still lives in countries where the population is going up exponentially. So if you don't give a damn about the poor people in other countries then it's no problem. Just sit in the richer countries who's populations are sinking and laugh at the poor forginers. You have a few generations before the problem comes back.
If you're in the 3rd world then the problem isn't going to get much better as people become even poorer.
Your linked post assumes that the internal populations of developed countries won't also change.
There's a current falloff as women take control of their own reproduction but the same mechanism which eliminated the Quakers could also bring back the old problem. Over a few generations any group which has far more children than average like religious groups who reject birth control or encourage large families will eventually make up the majority of the population. Once they make up a majority of the population in a developed country then the birth rate will shoot right back up again. Even without religious reasons in an environment where even children who's parents are utterly unable to provide for them make it to adulthood then any traits which cause you to have more kids are selected for. So for example even a genetic trait which causes women to have a stronger drive to have children gets selected for.
Slashdot Mirror
They just listed the leaders/countries which were rates as not free by Freedom House.
A country can be democratic and still be authoritarian or oppressive.
Which state/city was it where people were getting parking tickets for parking in their own front yards because of some city ordinance that allowed them to do that.
These things start as protecting a shared resource, eventually they all end up as revenue generation.
"just that trying to regulate it by making it legal is unlikely to improve things."
So government oversight, improved working conditions for the majority employed in the sector, legal liability for employers who fail to protect their employees, STD screening and counselling would in no way improve the lot of the average working prostitute?
It's not an ideal profession but making it illegal simply makes the situation worse for the women involved.
On the front of addictive drugs how's that approach working out?
That's pretty much the approach they take it a lot of places.
Drugs are still easily available to anyone with cash who wants them.
People still steal to fun their habit.
http://www.planetrulers.com/current-dictators/
authoritarian regimes/dictatorships
Algeria - Abdelaziz Bouteflika, President of Algeria
Angola - Mr. Jose Eduardo dos Santos, President of Angola
Azerbaijan - Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan
Belarus - Aleksandr Lukashenko, President of Belarus
Bhutan - Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, King of Bhutan
Brunei - Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu'izzaddin Waddaulah
Cambodia - His Majesty King Norodom Sihamoni, King of Cambodia
Cameroon - Paul Biya, President of Cameroon
Chad - Idriss Deby, President of Chad
China - Hu Jintao, President of China
Congo, Dem. Rep. of - Isidore Mvouba, Prime Minister of Congo
Côte d'Ivoire - Laurent Gbagbo, President of Cote d'Ivoire
Cuba - Raul Castro, President of Cuba
Egypt - Hosny Mubarak, President of Egypt
Equatorial Guinea - OBIANG NGUEMA MBASOGO, President
Eritrea - Isaias Afwerki, President of Eritrea
Guinea - Lansana Conte, President of Guinea
Iran - Mahmoud Ahmadi Nejad, President of Iran
Iraq - Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq
Kazakhstan - Nursultan Nazarbaev, President of Kazakhstan
Laos - Lieutenant General Choummaly Sayasone, President
Libya - Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Leader of Libya
Myanmar (Burma) - Soe Win, Prime Minister of Myanmar (Burma)
North Korea - Kim Jong-il, President of North Korea
Oman - Qaboos bin Said Al-Said, Prime Minister of Oman
Pakistan - Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan
Qatar - Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani
Russia - Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, President of Russia
Rwanda - Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda
Saudi Arabia - King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, King of Saudi Arabia
Somalia - Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, President of Somalia
Sudan - Omar H.A. Al-Bashier, President of Sudan
Swaziland - Mswati III, King of Swaziland
Syria - Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria
Tajikistan - Emomalii Rahmon, President of Tadjikistan
Thailand - Surayut Chulanon, Royal Prime Minister of Thailand
Togo - Faure Essozimna Gnassingbe, President of Togo
Tunisia - Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, President of Tunisia
Turkmenistan - Gurbanguly BERDIMUHAMEDOW, President of Turkmenistan
United Arab Emirates - Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan
Uzbekistan - Islam Abdughanievich Karimov, President of Uzbekistan
Vietnam - Nong Duc Manh, President of Vietnam
Zimbabwe - Robert (Gabriel) Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe
From the link you posted, did you even read that?
Or do you not use the system you posted?
"The BlackBerry Enterprise Solution offers two transport encryption options, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Triple Data Encryption Standard (Triple DES)*, for all data transmitted between BlackBerry® Enterprise Server and BlackBerry smartphones.
Private encryption keys are generated in a secure, two-way authenticated environment and are assigned to each BlackBerry smartphone user. Each secret key is stored only in the user's secure enterprise account (i.e., Microsoft® Exchange, IBM® Lotus® Domino® or Novell® GroupWise®) and on their BlackBerry smartphone and can be regenerated wirelessly by the user.
Data sent to the BlackBerry smartphone is encrypted by BlackBerry Enterprise Server using the private key retrieved from the user's mailbox. The encrypted information travels securely across the network to the smartphone where it is decrypted with the key stored there."
Storing your private key in 2 places is traditionally a bad idea. Especially when one of those places is in the hands of a company which can be compelled to hand it over without telling you.
If the goal were to simply be able to send data securely between your secure enterprise account and your blackberry then your secure enterprise account should only have your public key with which to encrypt data it sends to you and your private key should remain in your hands and your hands alone.
Idealy the secure enterprise account shouldn't be able to decrypt your data at all.
Now this could be for the sake of efficiency since public key crypto takes more cpu cycles but simply put if the US government asked for your private key, lets say they sent an NSL, RIM would be able to give it to them.
That is not a secure system.
A secure system would be one where only you have your private key and where blackberry merely validates certificates.
In which case anyone who wanted to read your communications would have to perform an explicit man in the middle attack after strong-arming blackberry into signing a cert for them.
So to make it genuinely secure you'd have to use public key crypto and let people choose their own certificate service in which case it would be as secure as the cert service and devices themselves.
So you are saying that my private encryption key on my blackberry has been turned over to the US government?
Simply put, if they asked for it then yes, there's nothing stopping that.
Autorun is the only infection vector of Agent.btz, through thumbdrives or through network drives.
If it was not agent.btz then they're being convicted in the the court of ignorance by their own claims.
If it really was agent.btz then they deserve the accusations of incompetence.
"and easily detected by anti-virus software both then and now."
And this is the simple reason why no sophisticated attacker would use an already known virus.
Viruses are not that hard to write, I'm only a moderately skilled programmer and I've written a couple for the sake of proving I could (never released though).
If you use a known virus that's already infected grandmas computer then the AV companies will know it.
If you write your own with code unknown to the AV companies, even a fairly trivial virus that avoids disrupting the system or moving out into the greater internet can remain hidden indefinitely.
The simple fact that it was detected as Agent.btz at all will tell you that it's not a foreign intelligence service arranging the infection and is vastly vastly more likely to be a simple case of joe blogs plugging a thumb drive into his infected home machine and then taking it back into work.
Anyone with a serious goal of compromising specific military systems will roll their own if only to avoid detection.
And deniability is a paltry claim, viruses don't come with a "made in" sticker, a custom virus would be little different from the legions of programs created every day by people looking to steal credit card numbers and you're not going to be able to tie it back to whoever created it unless they fuck up.
Actually being ON or OFF makes all the difference.
It does spread through the network- using autorun.
Another infection vector: when a clean computer attempts to map a drive letter to a shared network resource that has Agent.atz on it and the corresponding autorun.inf file, it will (by default) open autorun.inf file and follow its instruction to load the malware. Once infected, it will do the same with other removable drives connected to it or other computers in the network that attempt to map a drive letter to its shared drive infected with Agent.atz - hence, the replication.
Did you even read the article you linked?
Any vaguely security conscious and competent network admin disables autorun and has since long before vista.
There's fuck all essential uses for autorun more significant than the security threat it of having it turned on.
sorry about that, the way slashdot displays replies to low rated comments threw me off. I didn't see what you were replying to.
oh come on, autorun has been spreading USB viruses for years.
Turning it off was basic common sense before vista ever hit the shelves.
on military systems.
And so they can either pretend it didn't happen or pretend that they were only defeated by a dedicated and skilful foe rather than by their own ineptitude and laziness.
they went with the latter.
It's probably a reference to how poor forecasts any more can a few days ahead can be.
1 and 2 day forecasts tend to be pretty good.
That is a fair point, people who are pushing the "sex is bad" moral outrage always seem to decide that the services of the sex industry are of zero value to society.
But I'd ask how many people who for one reason or another find it hard to establish relationships be it due to disability, deformity or simple social awkwardness don't swallow the contents of their medicine cabinet thanks to the occasional services of a prostitute.
A real loving relationship is preferable and more fulfilling but counter to fairy-tales not everyone gets to have those.
Simply touching and being touched by another human being now and then can do wonders for your state of mind.
I've never reached the point where I wanted to go out and hire someone for sex but if I hadn't found myself a girlfriend and for one reason or another had ended up with no realistic prospect of significant human contact I can see how utterly crushing loneliness could have become.
And friendly hugs don't fix some kinds of loneliness.
I'm guessing dismemberment, downing or burning to death trapped in a car didn't feature heavily either yet those are very real risks for people working in the very legal areas of timber cutting, fishing or taxi driving.
And doctors and nurses have to wear a lot of protective equipment as bodily fluids are a very significant part of their work.
"can be made safe relatively easily."
and yet are not.
Legal brothels can have STD testing, enforced condom use, security services, enforced counselling for drug use or other psychological problems.
And best of all if it's legal then the brothels can be held liable for on the job injuries or infections like any other employer.
Clean? no, flexible hours and reasonable safety? absolutely.
but you go on with trying to section off anything to do with sex and other sinful things and pretending it's special and different from other jobs because sex is involved.
"My point is that I don't think it is possible for the majority of prostitutes to live and work in a safe environment where they will not suffer grievous physical or mental harm even if you regulate the industry. The benefits of men being able to pay for sex and for some women to willingly choose prostitution as an occupation do not outweigh the harm done to the majority IMHO."
So you're not really interested in actual sensible measures of harm but rather the simple fact that you arbitrarily decide that a particular type of service(anything sex related) is virtually worthless and anything to do with the sex industry to be utterly harmful to it's workers.
"My point is that I don't think it is possible for the majority of prostitutes to live and work in a safe environment where they will not suffer grievous physical or mental harm even if you regulate the industry. "
So instead of the majority of them working in regulated brothels with security and a controlled environment and regular STD tests(also giving an even stronger incentive to take as many measures as possible to remain STD free) it should be unregulated and they can all work out on the street.
Fantastic idea.
Because all you a achieve by making it illegal is to make the working conditions worse.
(any making yourself feel better of course since you also make it less visible so you don't have to think about it)
If we could fix the problems that drive people into prostitution we would have long ago.
But poverty, drug abuse and plain old wanting a job with high pay and short hours are not things which are going to go away within our lifetimes.
Y'know I didn't even notice the selection bias there until you pointed it out.
and yet despite that plenty of timber cutters still get crushed or mortally injured.
Fishermen still get washed overboard or die of hypothermia before they can be pulled out of the water or reach a medical facility.
Pilots still die in crashes and receive unhealthy doses of radiation(if you know how to shield a high altitude plane please speak up).
Metal workers still get burned or die from fume inhalation.
Roofers still fall.
Electricians still get electrocuted.
Farmers still get caught on machinery and killed or maimed.
Should we ban Timber cutting because the men who work in the profession are apparently too inept to decide what risks they're willing to take themselves?
In most of those professions there are safety precautions you can take yet most of them remain damned dangerous in the real world.
"The point is that all of these jobs have a realistic chance of being made safe so that people doing them don't suffer unnecessarily."
not really. I imagine that in america the land of litigation the pressure to make the aforementioned workplaces safe is huge and yet they're still dangerous jobs which kill a lot of people each year.
And some of those jobs don't even pay very well.
"Anyway, ask any of the charities working with sex workers and they will tell you that the majority of people don't want to do it"
Ask people in almost any dirty unpleasant job and you'll find most of them don't want to do it but end up forced into it because it pays better than minimum wage and they have other problems in their lives.
That's pretty much the reason why anyone gets any job at all.
"There is also the issue of women being transported, sometimes under-age, into a country just to be sex workers. When you can't even speak the local language it is hard to get your rights respected."
Which has sweet fuck all to do with legalizing prostitution.
people are imported and forced to work as slave labour in factories in many places around the world but that has sweet fuck all to do with legal, regulated, paid work doing similar jobs.
"Regulation tends not to help those people much as regulated brothels have overheads that push prices up beyond what an less than good-looking and possibly unhealthy girl can charge."
Regulation does that to other industries.
It forces out those who are least suited to the industry and those who are not safe in the industry.
"Also most jurisdictions require prostitutes to get help for addiction and take regular STD tests which will exclude many."
Wow, you say that like it's a bad thing.
regulating it helps to improve peoples lives ,gets them off drugs and requires them to get STD tests.
wow, how awful.
Legalisation vastly superior to illegal prostitution.
If we could fix the things that drove people into prostitution we would have already.
Poverty, drug abuse and plain old wanting money for things are not problems that are going to go away in any kind of reasonable timeframe.
"Running a legal brothel is a good way to find clients for your illegal imports."
Kinda like how my local tobacconist sells heroin and meth in the back room... oh wait, no he doesn't.
"Because if my life is shitty, her life should be even shitter."
So you think a prostitutes life would be better if she couldn't get any clients?
really?
It's an unpleasent job which few people are willing to do and for which there is a high demand which as such tends to pay well(unless someone else like a pimp is taking the income).
It's a dirty job.
So?
There are people in this world who as part of their jobs have to spend all day surounded by human faeces working sewer maintainance with all the dangers of infections that entails.
There are people who work jobs where they can lose a limb to a saw blade.
Or be crushed in an industrial accident.
I know a girl who had a job where one of her duties was to put down the animals at a lab which used animal testing, think that has no psychological ramifications?
My father at one point worked in a slaughterhouse cleaning the grizzle, blood and brains off the walls and equipment. any psychological ramifications there?
There are high class office jobs where conditions are better, but unless the person happens to be skilled and lucky enough to land that kind of job they're not going to get those.
But sure, if sex is in any way involved then its special and it can't be considered in a reasonable adult manner.
pretty much every living organism on the planet tends to increase it's population exponentially when provided with excess food and a reasonably livable environment until it either runs out of food or screws up it's own environment and humans are no different.
you on the other hand are making some stunningly shaky assumptions that a trend in the rate of growth will continue indefinitely into the future or only turn around when it's convenient.
http://xkcd.com/605/
Or even worse, someone who simply does not understand that even if you're sued for something someone else did because they got the name wrong you can lose by default if you ignore the letter sent to the wrong person.
it's not even vaguely fair or logical except to someone who's been hanging around with lawyers too much.
So if I sue the crotchety old illiterate farmer, who hates the guberment and is most likely going to throw any letters in the bin, for something he didn't do I can get a default judgement and take his farm?
sweet!
problem being that living things tend to evolve.
If a random mutation produces a strain that doesn't bother spending any of it's energy on fixing nitrogen unless it gains some big advantage from it the new strain will out-compete the old one.
it's not as big nor as immediate a problem as it was believed to be 50 years ago but exponential growth is still exponential growth.
And even if the most developed countries are not suffering the same problem the vast majority of the human race still lives in countries where the population is going up exponentially.
So if you don't give a damn about the poor people in other countries then it's no problem.
Just sit in the richer countries who's populations are sinking and laugh at the poor forginers.
You have a few generations before the problem comes back.
If you're in the 3rd world then the problem isn't going to get much better as people become even poorer.
Your linked post assumes that the internal populations of developed countries won't also change.
There's a current falloff as women take control of their own reproduction but the same mechanism which eliminated the Quakers could also bring back the old problem.
Over a few generations any group which has far more children than average like religious groups who reject birth control or encourage large families will eventually make up the majority of the population.
Once they make up a majority of the population in a developed country then the birth rate will shoot right back up again.
Even without religious reasons in an environment where even children who's parents are utterly unable to provide for them make it to adulthood then any traits which cause you to have more kids are selected for.
So for example even a genetic trait which causes women to have a stronger drive to have children gets selected for.
either way long term the birth rate goes back up.