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“When we were talking with workers, they just wanted to get back to the cockroaches, how the studio owner charges them for toilet paper or makes them work when they’re on their period. I couldn’t get people to talk to me about platforms, and that’s completely valid because of course you are mad at the guy you know,” Killbride tells WIRED. “But there’s a whole other layer that has been left completely invisible. This is a billion-dollar industry that has been able to excuse itself from rebuke.”

WIRED attempted to contact BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin, and Stripchat to request comment about the research findings. None responded.

HRW’s report outlines crucial recommendations for improving conditions at both the studio and platform levels. This includes occupational safety standards for studios enforced with regular inspections. Models must be able to take breaks and receive a minimum wage for their work, studio management should not force models to perform specific sex acts or agree that they will perform any act on behalf of the models. Additionally, models should have access to a confidential reporting mechanism so they can notify law enforcement or other authorities about workplace violations.

Developing recommendations for the platforms themselves is even more nuanced. Killbride says that most if not all of the popular adult streaming platforms have stringent authentication requirements for creating accounts and specifically prohibit studio owners or anyone from accepting terms of service on behalf of someone else. In practice, though, the companies are not doing enough, HRW researchers claim, to offer terms of service in a simple, understandable format in a variety of languages, including Spanish.

Platforms also need to provide channels through which content creators can report violations and receive a timely response, the researchers say. And, crucially, platforms should establish policies that enable models to take ownership of and transfer their accounts from a studio. Researchers found that the current status quo on many platforms involves policy language that may confuse its users or technical complications that keep content creators say prevents them from being able to assert ownership of their accounts.

On top of everything else, the stakes are particularly high for account ownership issues, because the researchers found that studios often use “recycled” accounts—those that were authenticated and established by one cammer and then retained by a studio—to circumvent minimum age requirements and stream child sexual abuse material.

“We found that although the platforms are quite strict and have completely clear policies about not streaming kids, the studios do still manage to hire and stream children using fake IDs or, more commonly, recycled accounts,” Killbride says. “Our research was all with adults, but many people we talked to started streaming as kids when they were 13 to 17.”

Killbride emphasizes that the situation reflects an important tenet of sex worker advocacy and labor reform in general: Listening to workers about their needs and the protections that would help them do their jobs most effectively and equitably also, simultaneously, protects other vulnerable populations. In this case, by allowing cammers to control and transfer their accounts and their followings, the adult streaming industry could also drastically reduce the prevalence of child sexual abuse material.

This sauna isn’t made of cedar but cheaper hemlock, which means you don’t get the same glorious cedar smell you’d be familiar with from more classic saunas. That said, the Canadian hemlock does have a nice woody aroma that has lingered after many months of use; it’s still a calming place to be, aroma-wise, even with all that sweat.

Quick and Painless

Unlike traditional saunas, which can take a long time to pre-heat, this infrared model is quick and painless. You press the buttons on the built-in thermostat inside the door to decide how hot and for how long you want it to run and it instantly begins heating. I usually give it at least 20 minutes to warm up the ambient temp of the tiny box.

The included thermostat goes to 149 degrees Fahrenheit, but I’ve only consistently been able to get it to about 145 degrees after 45 minutes of pre-heating. The timer counts down from 99 minutes, so you can have it pre-heat and then remain on for however long you want to sit in there. The sauna is lightweight and not well insulated, so I’d keep it inside if I didn’t have it in Portland, Oregon’s mild winter climate.

There are infrared heating panels behind, on the sides, below, and behind your legs for relatively even heating on the body. I found the floor heat can get a bit toasty if you have your feet right above the space beside a slat on the wooden floor, but otherwise, I was fully sweating as much and feeling as overheated after a similar time in a traditional sauna.

Photograph: Parker Hall

It’s nice to sit outside under the covered area, look out at my garden, and sweat it out for a few minutes before heading to my non-gross, non-gym shower. It truly feels like I’m at a spa. And I can pair to the built-in Bluetooth speakers and watch my latest shows or a YouTube meditation.

If you, like me, don’t have regular access to a sauna at the gym anymore and have discovered how much you miss heat exposure time, there aren’t many options as affordable and easy to set up as this. I’ve even moved it between houses with no issues (the movers didn’t have to disassemble it because it’s so light). How long it will last is a different question and only time will tell, but it has held up for me for several months.

You can’t share the experience with friends and loved ones, but that’s fine as I use my sauna time at the end of the day to wind down from social interactions. If you want to host sauna hangs at your house, you’re better off with a larger model or a traditional sauna, which of course, Wayfair also sells.

In recent earnings calls, shareholders in some publicly traded meat companies have asked whether the Trump administration’s deportation plans—among other issues—may pose a challenge to their industry. “We’ve been there before. It did not impact our business,” said Tim Klein, CEO of National Beef, which is owned by the Brazilian food company Marfrig, in response to a question from a shareholder. In response to a similar question in a Tyson Foods earnings call, CEO Donnie King said, “There’s a lot that we don’t know at this point, but I would remind you that we’ve successfully operated this business for over 90 years, no matter the party in control.”

It’s not clear whether the Trump regime would target meatpacking facilities operated by the biggest firms in the industry, given the favorable treatment these companies received at times during the first Trump presidency. During the Covid-19 pandemic, President Trump issued an executive order that allowed plants to keep operating, even as meatpackers were some of the hardest hit by infections. The US House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis later found that Tyson’s legal department drafted a text of the proposed order.

“These large meatpacking companies prevented additional protections from being put in place to protect workers, in part by engaging in a concerted effort with Trump administration political officials to insulate themselves from oversight, to force workers to remain in dangerous conditions, and to shield themselves from liability for any resulting worker illness or death,” the committee concluded in the report released in December 2022.

The supply of labor is tight in meatpacking plants and the farming industry as a whole, says Cesar Escalante, a professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Agriculture & Environmental Sciences. The industry is in need of more workers, says Escalante, who argues that the US should expand the H-2A seasonal agricultural worker visa scheme to include more livestock workers. Smaller farms are more likely to be affected by a lack of workers, says Escalante, while larger farms may switch to mechanization.

If meatpacking workers are deported en masse, then that could translate into a rise in prices for consumers. A report from Texas A&M Agrilife Research estimates that eliminating immigrant labor on US dairy farms would nearly double retail milk prices. It’s not clear what the impact of Trump’s deportation plan would be on meat or food prices more generally, because so much about the plan remains unknown. “We don’t know yet how this is all going to pan out,” Hubbard says.