Mmm…no

It’s “some random guy with a working moral framework, the ability to feel empathy, and some measure of respect for the rights of other humans and simple human decency calling a bunch of murderous xenophobic psychopaths murderous xenophobic psychopaths.” So it’s in fact nothing like that.

The system as a whole.

No - it’s actually not like that at all.

Google didn’t pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.

Mm… no. It’s really not.

The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.

So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.

So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you’re free to go.

Best of luck to them.

It’s true in essentially all industries, but it’s especially obvious in rideshare that there’s a layer of parasites who get paid far too much money for nothing beyond the fact that they won the fight for the position of “parasite who gets paid far too much money for doing nothing.”

Anything that might even just decrease the number of overpaid parasites would be a benefit not just to the concerned industry, but to society as a whole.

How deliciously ironic that this is paywalled.

And I stand by everything I said there.

And I also believe that the threadiverse will continue to grow overall.

And I don’t believe that those two things are in any way contradictory.

And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”

If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.

The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.

Actually, I think it’s amusingly perfect that the tankies were hyperfocused on conjectural threats posed by capitalists and entirely missed the much more imminent threat posed by a government.