Already did, though instead of the bot, I blocked the entire instance.

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.

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.

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.