Porn and Banking Regulators

Surprisingly, I'm about to argue for deregulation at the SEC. That's far afield from my normal politics, but then, this is not about normal politics or what's supposed to be going on at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It turns out that the guys who were supposed to be regulating our banks instead spent their days searching for porn.

Story here

SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed

_ A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. ...

_ An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." ...

California Rep. Darrell Issa, ... said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."

So, of course, the short-sighted response is to spend more government money investigating, disciplining, firing, and hiring replacements. The intention being to make it harder for someone to spend all day searching for porn on the job, and to punish them more heavily when and if they do so. This deterence methods are guaranteed to fail. If being blocked 16,000 times doesn't stop you from spending 8 hours a day looking for porn, then honestly nothing will. These people's jobs must be boring, and their lives must be desperate.

The real solution here is deregulation, or actually, one step past deregulation. If you want to stop people from spending all day searching for porn, the way to do so is to pony up for a couple of high-quality porn sites for all employees.

People spend all day searching for porn when they're bored and have nothing else to do, so a lousy do-nothing job like the SEC is bound to have people slacking (and whacking) off. I mean, it's not like the SEC actually polices the financial sector, they're not paid enough to do that. Their job, whether we like it or not, is to sit around pretending to regulate while waiting for corporate America to send them their next big fat bribe check. Waiting for your next bribe is not exciting or engaging, so some segment of the workforce at the SEC will always be bored and looking to get off.

As anyone whose ever spent hours looking for porn can attest, you can kill a hell of a lot of time looking for something that's actually worth watching. Most of the amateur fucking on the internet is horrid. Either it's boring and uncreative, or the opposite - it's too damn disturbing to enjoy. If you grab a DVD or magazine out of your own collection, you can be done in 20 minutes or less, but if you have to get your rocks off via a net search, expect to spend many hours trying to find something that matches your particular tastes in kink. It's the way things are, and we all know it.

If the government wants to increase productivity in the boring SEC workplace, they shouldn't regulate, restrict, and investigate. They should give each employee a budget, enough to get subscriptions at the 2 or 3 websites that best match their tastes. Instead of spending 4 or 8 hours hunting for porn day after day, they'll log in for 30 minutes, have a nice orgasm, and get back to work. They may do so again 2 or 3 more times during the day, but that still totals less than 2 hours total spent on porn daily, and happy workers will be more rested and productive in-between porn searches.

Hell, throw some hookers into the mix, and you might create a work environment rewarding enough for the SEC to stop taking bribes. Just sayin'.