Sunday, November 12, 2006

What kind of porn are people in the Philippines and Singapore searching for?

This search engine describes itself as "just like google, but grown up" and its mission is "to organize all free porn on the internet". Okay whatever.

They analyzed the search logs and published a list that enumerates the kind of porn people from different countries are searching. Unfortunately the article is not dated so I can't tell you when this analysis was made but here are excerpts of the results:

People from Singapore use their search engine to search for:

public ,nubiles, babysitter, japan, voyeur, sybian, riding, hegre, kyla cole, av, tokyo, hentai lesbian,mia, cameron, party, celebrity, sisters, claudia a, lesbian teen, milfseeker ava, "kyla cole", lovely anne, peter north, busty japanese, lucky, lacie, girl cum, swimming pool, jp18
Hmmm. Those didn't make any sense to me. So let's look at the searches from the Philippines:
silvia saint, bukkake, 99bb, czech ashley robbins, boob exam, classic porn, evelyn lory, throat fuck, fitness models, fuck her throat
Evelyn Lory? Sino yun? Take the results with a grain of salt because we don't know when this was done and I doubt that it followed any scientific methodology (it's porn, not rocket science).

Why the Philippines is poor

Reason Magazine explains in this article why the Philippines is poor. It's a couple of pages long but i've taken some excerpts below:

Consider the situation: money that was provided because of social networks rather than need; a project designed for prestige rather than use; a lack of monitoring and accountability; and an architect appointed for show by somebody with little interest in the quality of the work. The outcome is hardly surprising: A project that should never have been built was built, and built badly. The lesson of the story might appear to be that self-interested and ambitious people in power are often the cause of wastefulness in developing countries. But self-interested and ambitious people are in positions of power, great and small, all over the world.
But then you might say that it's not news at all that corruption is a small part of a bigger picture of why we are poor but the article contends that...
It is not news that corruption and perverse incentives matter. But perhaps it is news that the problem of twisted rules and institutions explains not just a little bit of the gap between [the poor] and rich countries but almost all of the gap.
The story ends with...
We still don't have a good word to describe what is missing ... in poor countries across the world. But we are starting to understand what it is. Some people call it "social capital," or maybe "trust." Others call it "the rule of law," or "institutions." But these are just labels. The problem is that ... like other poor countries, [it] is a topsy-turvy place where it's in most people's interest to take actions that directly or indirectly damage everyone else.
So how do we fix it?
Unfortunately, the article just gives us the reason why. It does not tell us how to fix it.