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.

I never really liked Reddit. I avoided it for a long time, but finally relented and grudgingly signed up in 2011.

I was always on the lookout for a new home, and would follow links to any place that looked promising, but none of them ever panned out - they were always too dead or too narrowly focused or too shitty or behind a paywall or something. And I’d go back to Reddit.

Immediately after Spez’s petulant AMA, I happened on a link to join-lemmy.org. I was especially eager to find a different forum then, just because Reddit was set to get much worse much more quickly and the CEO is a twat, but I really didn’t expect anything of lemmy. I assumed that, just as with all the others over the years, I’d browse around a bit, be unimpressed, and leave.

Instead, I looked around and liked what I saw. And the more I looked, the more I liked it. And I just never went back, and have been here ever since.

I don’t think we can gatekeep it either.

But we can, or not, encourage it. I’d rather not. I’ve never - not even once in more than 30 years online - seen a forum get notably popular without it also, and obviously as a direct result, going to shit.

The great thing about the fediverse is that people have control over which instances they are around, and there will always be some more isolated ones if that’s what you prefer.

If the masses discover the fediverse and move here, that’s not going to remain the case, guaranteed.

They’ll bitch and moan because content isn’t centralized (we’ve already seen that), and the rent-seeking fuckwads will, one way or another, rearrange things so that it is centralized, and specifically so that they can then squat on top of it and suck profit out of it, and it’ll end up just another facebook/twitter/instagram/reddit.

Count on it.

Why on Earth would we want to do that?

The last thing in the world the fediverse needs is a bunch of idiots blundering around in it.

Everybody else doing it.

Mmm… yes and no.

College towns are more lively and interesting, and notably more likely to have cultural things that similar-sized other towns don’t have - bookstores, galleries, music venues, museums and the like. That’s appealing.

But there’s a downside to living in a college town as a non-student. The town is mostly geared toward serving the students, and that can get tiresome, since it’s near certain that some significant number of the students are going to be… well… assholes.

Someone elsewhere in the thread mentioned tourist towns and their similar appeal, and I’d agree. But with the exact same proviso.

Bluntly?

This is the dumbest variation I’ve ever seen on the already dumb idea of trying to compensate for a perceived lack of content on Lemmy by just cribbing stiff from Reddit.

It doesn’t matter if it’s Reddit, Lemmy or anywhere else - if the username checks out, then the username checks out, and that’s an amusing tidbit worth mentioning.

And this is definitely a case in which the username checks out.

I doubt you’d even get a coherent sentence. Just random strings of emotive nouns and adjectives with irrelevant verbs sprinkled in here and there.

SOS Pads and Scotch Tape

Mark Sandman

I suppose one could. I have no idea why anyone but an emotionally disturbed moron would though.

It seems sort of like condemning punching yourself in the nose while punching yourself in the eye - it’s like you somehow managed to both get the point and miss it completely, at the same time.

Neurotypical does mean pretty much exactly that, with only the clarification that while communication is significant, it extends beyond that.

That’s a lot of why the terminology “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” exists in the first place - because at this point, it doesn’t even pretend to be an objective measure of mental health, but simply a pair of labels with which to describe the degrees to which people do or do not accord to current societal standards.

For example - posit a society in which it has become socially acceptable and even expected, when you meet someone, to punch them in the face.

If one were to ask a person how they feel about punching other people in the face, it’s fairly obvious that the objectively psychologically sound view is that that’s a thing they would not and likely could not do.

But to actually act in that way - to be unwilling or even unable to do it in a society in which it’s the norm and thus the expected and sanctioned behavior - would be “neurodivergent.” The conclusion would be that one must suffer from some psychological or physiological affliction that makes it so that one is unwilling or unable to act in a way that accords with expected behavior or societal norms. That one is “neurodivergent” instead of “neurotypical.”

Who’s this “we?”

I love the taste of coffee. That’s why I drink it.

Wow… Maher on Rogan.

That’s such a mass of overconfidence bias in one place that it seems like they should’ve collapsed into some sort of Dunning-Kruger singularity.