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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • They literally ruled that interested parties can pay a gratituity to officials and politicians, so long as the official act they’re paying for occurs before payment.

    That’s not some pessimistic reading of the case. It’s not subtle at all in it’s intention to legalize bribery at the federal level.

    The case at hand was a mayor that gave a contract to a waste disposal company worth about a million dollars overtly in exchange for them paying him $15,000 after the contract was awarded.

    He was prosecuted for official corruption and bribery, and the Supreme Court threw it out because he was paid after the corrupt act and not before.


  • Sounds like the wrong party has been hoarding weapons.

    Jesus, this is bleak. In a week they’ve straight-up legalized giving gifts to officials as an overt gratuity and declared Presidents immune from the law.

    Part of me wants to see the current President take advantage of this moment to forcibly install a Court that will quickly overturn these decisions and return us to sanity.








  • My Dad used to be a hot-shot delivery driver.

    He didn’t sit around waiting for a job. He’d go about his business and when his phone pinged he’d decide in the moment if he wanted to do the job.

    Sometimes we’d be watching TV and his phone would ping and he’d get up to leave. Sometimes he wasn’t interested and he’d let someone else get it.

    The issue with Uber, Lyft, etc isn’t that they treat their drivers as contractors. People who have they option of when, where, and whether to work and are paid per task aren’t employees. The problem is the pay is terrible for what they’re doing.


  • What you’re talking about is “waiting to be engaged” versus “engaged to wait.”

    The drivers are not on set schedules and have no obligation to the company except for the time between accepting a fare and dropping them off. If the drivers were required to return to a staging area and wait for a call the they’d need compensation. But they’re not. They can do whatever they want at that point.

    When I worked retail I wasn’t paid for the time between my shift’s end and the next one beginning, but that’s what you’re arguing for in this case.




  • The Internet Archive had a system in place specifically to ensure that they had a legal license for each copy of the book loaded out digitally at any given time. This essentially made it a library.

    During the lockdown, they intentionally stopped using this system and loaned out unlimited copies. They didn’t just violate copyright in accident, they willfully and intentionally disabled their own systems designed to preserve copyright.

    I think the publishers suck too, but the Internet Archive humped the bunk on this one.