English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

2:00 PM

@tchrist Hmm 20% or 25% really seems rather high.

@MattЭллен Hmm perhaps more people go unlicensed through the Internet?

Matt Эллен

probably

tchrist

@Cerberus I thought so, too. Let me find the quote. I could imagine several possible reasons, but I have no reason to think any of them more likely, or indeed even likely at all.

Cerberus

@MattЭллен Ah, I see you already said that.

I don't think Tinder and Grinder are often used for prostitution.

I'm sure it happens, but...

Matt Эллен

I've seen two adverts on Tinder

tchrist

Who rules Tartarus before Hades?

Cerberus

2:02 PM

@tchrist Yeah it's probably a bit random.

Matt Эллен

not even 1%, I'd say

Cerberus

@tchrist Probably titans.

Matt Эллен

tchrist

Oh, Tartarus rules himself.

Cerberus

@MattЭллен Never seen that. I have seen an advertisement for a political party, and one for a festive party.

Matt Эллен

2:03 PM

nice

taken from here

tchrist

Oh for goodness’ sake, Pluto has five satellites now.

Robusto

TIL -there as a suffix is Greek for "beast"; cf. titanothere, German Tier

George Pompidou

I get my raspberry pi in the mail today. who's got the best idea for something English language related to do with it?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@GeorgePompidou You could teach it to wreck a nice beach

Matt Эллен

have it figure out all possible positions for fuck and its derivatives in a sentence

tchrist

2:08 PM

@Cerberus I feel like there should be a figure later than Tartarus and earlier than Hades, but I am not pulling him out of the Titan list.

Erebus?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@MattЭллен There are as many fucking positions as your imagination, and physical dexterity, allows.

George Pompidou

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 there's already a python module for that, so no work to do.

Matt Эллен

*im-fucking-agination vs imagi-fucking-nation

tchrist

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That suggests an infinitude.

Matt Эллен

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 har har

tchrist

2:10 PM

> A degree appears to raise earnings in the sex industry just as it does in the wider labour market. A study by Scott Cunningham of Baylor University and Todd Kendall of Compass Lexecon, a consultancy, shows that among prostitutes who worked during a given week, graduates earned on average 31% more than non-graduates

George Pompidou

@MattЭллен are you a pirate?

Matt Эллен

@GeorgePompidou no

that poster is of someone else who looks suspiciously like me

tchrist

> The data cover 84 cities in 12 countries, with the biggest number of workers being in America and most of the rest in big cities in other rich countries. As this site features only women, our analysis excludes male prostitutes (perhaps a fifth of the commercial-sex workforce). Almost all of those leaving reviews are men.

@Cerberus That’s where the quoted figure is from. So there is another 25% unaccounted for by those numbers.

Or so they say.

Matt Эллен

(20%)

tchrist

No, Matt.

If a fifth are male, and they cover only females, there is another quarter of the female count unaccounted for.

Matt Эллен

2:13 PM

1/5 = 20%

tchrist

Dear Matt, this is algebra not calculus.

X + Y = N

Y = N/5

X = 4Y

Where have I misstepped?

Y = X/4

Is not 20% a quarter of 80%?

Seriously, I’m asking. I do not pretend to be infallible in anything, let alone balancing my checkbook.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist Yes. There are 4x as many female sex workers as male if 20% of all sex workers are male.

Matt Эллен

Yes, 20 is a quarter of 80

tchrist

Ok, then the coffee is starting to work.

So there is another 25% of the female-count that is unaccounted for, which I thought I had said initially. Perhaps I was unclear.

Matt Эллен

oh. I misunderstood you

I thought you meant the whole count

tchrist

2:17 PM

Even if the algebra is right, the number seems surprising, as @Cerberus also observed.

This only counts individuals, not transactions. Perhaps the women have more transactions then the men.

Or maybe there are a lot of males who do this part-time or at-need, not as their sole source of income.

But they said that about the high-end female courtesans, too.

Cerberus

@tchrist It's all very fluid, no doubt.

tchrist

I wonder if that figure is intended to be global, or Western, or American, or something else.

Cerberus

@tchrist "Perhaps".

tchrist

Perhaps cuts a fine figure.

Cerberus

It is rather meaningless.

Matt Эллен

2:21 PM

@tchrist I suppose whatever the 12 countries are, biased towards America

tchrist

They could not have derived it from their “international review site of 190,000 sex-worker profiles”, since said site covers females only.

@MattЭллен G7 plus whom, I wonder.

Matt Эллен

or do you mean the number of male prostitutes?

tchrist

It would not make sense to mix rich and poor countries’ figures, I think.

@MattЭллен I mean I wonder why they say that males account for perhaps 25% of the commercial-sex workforce. I doubt whether they’re counting pimps, supervisors, or human resources contacts.

Matt Эллен

@tchrist oh. no idea

tchrist

I stand rather far behind even a celibate Catholic priest in personal knowledge of these carnal matters, but that figure is higher than I would expect. I would have imagined perhaps 5% or even 10%, but never 25%.

Also, probably it included only England not Wales.

Or maybe they included Sweden.

More than twice as many young men in Sweden sell sex as do women, a study published Monday by the Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs said.

I’m afraid that that bodes ill for Sweden’s future, what with their girls only half as hot at their boys.

Now I know why Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone, peopled as it is with Scandinavian immigrants, is a place where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking.

> Craigslist stands to make $36 million in revenue this year from adult services ads.

Cerberus

2:35 PM

@tchrist Odd.

tchrist

That’s a lot of bling.

@Cerberus Yeah. We’ll have to ask @JohanLarsson to theory eyes that one for us.

George Pompidou

@tchrist I think most of Sweden's boys are girls. have you seen them?

Johan Larsson

@tchrist What is the q?

George Pompidou

with their earrings and haircuts

Matt Эллен

yes! the way people dress determines their gender. Women who wear trousers are men! /sarcasm

tchrist

2:37 PM

@JohanLarsson Why there are twice the number of male prostitutes in Sweden that there are female ones.

Rosie the Riveter

Rosie the Riveter is a cultural icon of the United States, representing the American women who worked in factories during World War II, many of whom produced munitions and war supplies. These women sometimes took entirely new jobs replacing the male workers who were in the military. Rosie the Riveter is commonly used as a symbol of feminism and women's economic power. Use of similar images of women war workers appeared in other countries such as Britain. == History == The term "Rosie the Riveter" was first used in 1942 in a song of the same name written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. The song...

Johan Larsson

@tchrist Never heard that number, buying sex is illegal here. Selling is not.

Matt Эллен

so there are 3 prositutes in Sweden, and two are men. crazy

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@MattЭллен Maybe there's only on prostitute, and it's some 2/3 1/3 intersex person.

Matt Эллен

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I hadn't thought of that

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

someone who wears pants 2 days out of three, maybe, and earings the other day

Matt Эллен

2:40 PM

lol

tchrist

@JohanLarsson The current exposé in The Economist says that that approach is economically unsound nonsense that does not work if the goal is to cut down on those transactions.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist Are there any economically sound ways to discourage prostitution? Even full prohibition just pushes it underground

tchrist

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I always find genetic denominators that are not powers of two to be weird. :)

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I don’t know. But it would surprise me if there actually were any.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist Well, maybe it's conjoined triplets then, and one of them is female.

Johan Larsson

@tchrist I don't know how the law have worked.

tchrist

2:42 PM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That’s a tough egg to crack, but not impossible, actually.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist Yeah... it's not really very likely. conjoined multiples are usually identical.

Johan Larsson

Probably non-trivial to get accurate numbers as it does not happen in the open.

►

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

But all kinds of weird things are possible. Like, there was a woman whose ovaries didn't match the rest of her DNA, and so she failed a maternity test and lost custody of her children.

tchrist

Now I understand why Booking.COM in Amsterdam is buying up all the Perl programmers they can find.

> Results can be filtered, and users can arrange a session for a €5-10 ($6.50-13) booking fee.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

The best theory is that her ovaries were from the DNA of a re-absorbed twin

I mean, how bizarre would it be if you gave birth to a child, and then science said you hadn't?

For a man, you'd probably just assume your wife was unfaithful.

tchrist

2:46 PM

Yeah, there are lots of weird things. It’s hard but not impossible to be female if you have a Y chromosome, or to be male without one. But reading Cats Are Not Peas shows a bunch of ways this can happen, all very rare.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@tchrist well, you can be "female" (the words start getting meaningless) with a Y chromosome if you have AIS. I wonder, though, what are the odds of that happening in just one identical triplet (let alone conjoined)

tchrist

Yet in a global populace ~1e10, even rare events are bound to happen here and there and now and then.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

true

KitFox

Mitochondrial DNA is passed maternally.

So science could specifically say you weren't the mother of your child.

tchrist

Because only an ovum has mitochondria.

Matt Эллен

2:51 PM

Isn't mitochondrial dna in the egg, too, though?

tchrist

But the absorbed-twin thing for the ovaries should still be the same mitochondria, I should think.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@KitFox Yes. Well, it did say that, for this woman who clearly was the mother of her children, except that the way they were testing this didn't account for the particular idiosyncrasies of her body

tchrist

@MattЭллен That’s what I said, or tried to say.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I don't know what test they were using though.

Matt Эллен

@tchrist we are jinxed!

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

2:51 PM

Presumably her mitochondrial DNA should be the same as her absorbed twin's.

KitFox

I mean that her husband might think she cheated, but that would be complicated.

I can't articulate what's in my head.

tchrist

@JohanLarsson Sweden’s avowed aim is to wipe out prostitution by eliminating demand. But the sex trade will always exist—and the new approach has done nothing to cut the harms associated with it. Street prostitution declined after the law was introduced but soon increased again.

> Sex sells, and always will This new consensus is misguided, as a matter of both principle and practice. Banning the purchase of sex is as illiberal as banning its sale.

Johan Larsson

What is the law in US?

tchrist

These is not a law in the US.

There are zillions of laws in the US.

Johan Larsson

different state, different law?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

2:54 PM

Tim Minchin on the chances of things happening

tchrist

@JohanLarsson At the very least. It is not just state-controlled.

Cities have different laws.

Matt Эллен

As I understand it in the UK, you're allowed to pay for sex so long as neither party says anything about it. i.e. you can't ask to pay for sex and you can't ask to be paid for sex. but if sex happens and money changes hands, well, that's just business.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

> There was a 1 in 64,000,000 chance that this could happen! It's a miracle! But of course as we know it's not, because things that have a 1 in 64,000,000 chance of happening happen all the time. To presume that your 1 in 64,000,000 chance thing is a miracle is to significantly underestimate the total number of things that there are.

Matt Эллен

but I'm not someone who knows about the laws for sex work in the UK

so that's just hearsay

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@MattЭллен mm-hm.

user116848

2:58 PM

Can flirty flirt be used in a formal context? for e.g. "The beautiful spy girl distracted the mayor with her flirty flirt"

tchrist

Define formal context.

Are you by chance Asian?

Matt Эллен