Maybe you should get your news from a different source. Personally I prefer raw sources. I watch every official press briefing to hear from the horses mouth. You come to find that regardless of who is president news orgs put their own spin on it and you miss things they dont cover. Its all streamed on official government accounts.
Lmao, press briefings from the office of the führer is such a solid source to base your reality off of.
By the way if Kamala, Biden or Newsom was in office id also call them führer.
We live in a technocratic authoritarian state, the worlds largest prison population, the most police executions, we are actively sponsoring multiple genocides, we've killed over one million civilions in the middle east in two decades.
our politicians on both sides will go out of their way to protect pedophilic members of the ruling class...
But you want to tell us we're exaggerating or interpreting a reality that doesnt exist, i think youre the one who's been convinced through the regimes doublespeak that everythings alright.
Please revaluate. The US government is literally the 4th reich and actively committing halocausts on multiple fronts.
Do you know any history? You dishonor the people who died from horrible atrocities in WWII to make some glib performative political posturing. It's shameful behavior. Do better. Be better.
WWII didn’t start overnight. The Sturmabteilung (SA), also known as “The Brownshirts,” have a strong similarity to what we’re seeing with ICE and CBP. The SA were Hitler’s enforcers before the SS, during the 1920s and early 1930s. They were eventually usurped by the SS during “Night of the Long Knives” where SA leadership were executed by the SS. Largely because Hitler had felt threatened by the power Ernst Röhm had amassed (among other reasons). And the SA, like ICE, was made up largely of untrained sycophants and thugs who enjoy violence. They committed violence, harassed citizens, and had no consequences for doing so. They were also instrumental in laying the foundation for the genocide and atrocities committed by the Nazi party.
It’s not a dishonor to their memories, or the atrocities committed, to call that out. It is not a dishonor to say there are stark and real similarities between the way the US is operating and treating civilians.
I personally find the opposite, IMHO it is dishonors their memories to refuse to acknowledge the similarities.
I’ve posted a comment similar to this one here before, and like how I ended it. I strongly encourage you to read about the history of Nazi Germany and how it came to happen. It wasn’t just a zero to death camps, it was 15 years in the making. That history is deeply shocking, as it is depressing, because the parallels and timelines are too similar for anything besides outright discomfort, sadness, and fear between it and the US. But without knowing it, we are ever more likely to repeat it.
One final thing to note: the US has a history of extreme violence, slave patrols and the treatment of non-whites of the 19th century were an inspiration for Hitler.
Really difficult to say because it doesn't make many concrete claims. It doesn't mention any regulations or say what chemicals or processes are actually banned. These are not easy things to look up. I can tell you that at least the semiconductor fabrication stuff is false, there are many fabs in California and here's a new one as of a few days ago: https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/02/19/san-jose-tech-nokia-i....
I realize it isn't completed yet but I don't think anyone is buying sites for something that's impossible to build.
I can tell you that your two articles that intended to refute the semiconductor fabrication stuff fail to do so. Both sites were existing facilities and would therefore fall under the granfathered in point in the site.
The Infinera one is described as a "new fab" though (https://www.nist.gov/chips/infinera-california-san-jose) and the Bosch one is adding a new type of fabrication to an existing site. If you can do all that without getting new permits then that makes California sound like a pretty lenient place to do business. I'm assuming they did have to get new permits though.
This might be a refutation but it's not super clear. It's definitely not a commercial semiconductor fab but it might do all of or some subset of what a commercial fab does at R&D scale. Hard to know for sure how this jives with the claim in the main website.
> If you can do all that without getting new permits then that makes California sound like a pretty lenient place to do business.
Being able to retool under original zoning/permitting is specifically lenient? That's extremely basic. If you're a co-Californian with me, though, it does help to understand that many people think that anyone doing anything without a permit is "lenient".
> I'm assuming they did have to get new permits though.
Well, that makes it really easy to be "right". I should try this more.
> This might be a refutation but it's not super clear.
As others have pointed out, the article itself fails to provide any direct citations of the regulations either. This is classic Russell's teapot territory; the one making the initial claim shouldn't have a lower burden of evidence than the one refuting it.
> so obviously his point can’t be true
> so obviously he’s biased and we can’t do the mental work of sifting
> so obviously I can dismiss this as teleologically false.
Please don’t be so lazy you guys. There is something to be gained here.
Why do you think there's something to be gained here? There are a lot of cheap and easy checks this content fails that it represents a well formed argument based on reality.
There is no rational basis for anyone else to expend any effort refuting anything when the author has not said anything in the first place.
The article contains no citations, and so may be presumed 100% false by default.
"may be presumed", as in, sure it might actually contain some other mix of true and false, but it doesn't matter what that mix actually is. That only matters in some other article written by someone else that citates any of it's assertions.
This piece is the same as if monkeys typed stuff at random and some of it could possibly happen to be the same as something true. It doesn't mean the monkeys made a valid point, and no one should spend one second either defending or refuting it.
> so obviously he’s biased and we can’t do the mental work of sifting
This guy, with an obvious bias, created a website that misrepresents the situation in California (by implying things are banned or "nearly impossible" when in actuality they just take time/effort), while also failing to show the specific regulations or requirements for any of it. Without supplying that kind of information this website is little better than "It's banned. trust me bro". It's not our responsibility to try to dig up evidence to support or verify this guys claims just because he can't be bothered to do it.
His motivations, his framing of the problem, and his failure to back up his own statements makes the site pretty damn easy to dismiss and I don't even doubt that there might be instances where bad regulation exists, especially regulation that protects the profits of established players in certain industries by keeping out competition. I'm entirely sympathetic to the idea that it might be happening, but if there is something to be gained you aren't going to find it on this guys website. Serious coverage on this topic would include actionable information we can use to identify and solve specific problems. This is just anti-regulation propaganda.
I don't think it makes a good case for itself. No automotive paint shops sounds kind of ridiculous. I don't know anything about that industry but there has to be a way to paint cars in a safe way, right??
But lumping that in with semiconductor fabs, which are extremely toxic, makes me wonder how many of these banned industries I don't want in my state. I think if we want to build them in the US maybe don't build them in the most agriculturally productive and highest population state. Or first figure out how to do it without turning the US into China with its "cancer villages" from poisoned river water.
I'm not defending the dysfunctional CA bureaucracy, but the site should probably focus on specific cases of government-produced insanity than a general complaint that certain industries are banned from operation.
Wait, hold on - I watched all the seasons of "Rust To Riches" on Netflix, about a small shop that flips cars.
They routinely painted cars.
They'd paint in this sealed-up room/garage thingee, the guy would wear and industrial-grade mask, and the camera would slide past as he expertly painted the car. The 30 second montages looked awesome!
That show took place in Temecula, California. So there's no way that site is accurate.
And, more to the point, if they want to show that they are accurate they should be linking to the rules & regulations that actually prohibit these things instead of just making a claim & calling it a day.
It’s not claiming: you can’t have an automotive paint shop. It’s claiming you can’t start a new paint shop. Specifically, if you don’t have one for your car manufacturing line already, you can’t set one up. Wikipedia shows 13 pages for auto plants in CA. Most of them have the verb “was” in the opening sentence. There are two current plants: Tesla Fremont and Toyota California. Both of these plants are over 50 years old, and only one of them produces actual cars instead of parts.
Firstly, an auto paint shop is not the same as an auto manufacturing plant.
Secondly, it says you can't permit a new auto paint shop in CA, but it specifically mentions the Bay Area AQMD as the reason. But, as its name implies, the Bay Area AQMD only regulates within the San Francisco Bay Area. It is only one of 35 air districts in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_air_distric...
So, it is impossible to permit a new auto paint shop in all of these districts, or just the bay area? Because those are very different. It also labels starting a new paint shop as "impossible", but then says it's "nearly impossible". So is it actually impossible, or just nearly impossible?
It's claiming you can't get a permit to release VOCs into the air, but the GP comment describes a setup that apparently is designed to paint cars while preventing VOCs getting released into the air, so that you can still paint cars in California.
He doesn’t need to refute it he just needs to offer an alternate claim.
The site provides no citations, no evidence, so there’s no need to defend the count argument or honestly even make it.
The sit isn’t just false, it is flat out disrespectful to all the workers, engineers, founders, and everyone else involved in the industries he says don’t exist that actually do exist. The site is basically “I think this is hard so no one else could possibly do it”.
They're likely falling under some "we aren't selling car painting as a service or main part of our business, we're painting our own cars as a small ancillary part of our real business" exemption.
> I don't know anything about that industry but there has to be a way to paint cars in a safe way, right??
There are. They just cost more and take more time.
> But lumping that in with semiconductor fabs, which are extremely toxic
People say this all the time, but semiconductor fabs simply aren't very toxic compared to just about every other industrial manufacturing process. Mostly this is because everything is sealed and sealed and sealed some more.
Yes, they handle stuff like arsenic gas (arsine AsH3), but they really try to reclaim it all. The semiconductor waste stream is often purer than most industrial inputs. Yeah, old plants would just dump crap into the environment. However, for modern semiconductor facilities, it is generally more economic to reprocess your waste than try to purify from primary sources.
Now, PCB manufacturing, on the other hand, is quite terrible or at least it used to be. I don't know if people have sealed and automated that yet.
I assume you use semiconductors yourself, since you are posting here. But you want their manufacture to be banned in your state.
So the right thing is to outsource the dirty jobs to countries that can’t afford to be picky?
Wouldn’t it be better for the world if we used our wealth to develop methods of safe semiconductor manufacturing with low environmental impact, and proudly built those facilities in California?
It's not like the laws are simply "you can't make semiconductors here". The laws ban the harmful externalities of the process. The companies that want to make semiconductors don't want to find a way to make the processes less harmful: it's cheaper and easier to just go somewhere where they can pollute instead.
There's a large middle ground between "Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone" and letting blatant polluters turn your neighborhood into a Superfund site. California solved the latter problem by going too far in the other direction.
You're asking for an example of an environmental disaster of the type the regulation is intended to prevent that happened since the regulation came into effect, with the implication that there aren't any is evidence that the regulation is bad? I'd argue there's no way to differentiate between perfectly calibrated regulation and regulation that's too onerous by the metric you're giving, so your conclusion isn't supported without more evidence.
California, by density, is that highly populated. I didn't really like the idea is "hey we need to build something that uses a toxic process, by just don't build it here. Build it somewhere else." Unless that somewhere else is in outer space.
I'm actually quite surprised by the number of people who have fallen for this. There aren't even any concrete claims here – just the vague assertion that some things are "impossible".
Yes. They lump in sheet metal stamping with giga casting. They are completely different techs with different energy footprints. Banning aluminum casting does not implicitly ban stamping.
No idea how you can hold a company liable for the crimes committed by employees, regardless of how awful those crimes might be. I assume this will get overturned.
The question here was whether Uber could claim the drivers were not, in fact, employees.
(edit: A commenter correctly explains that no employee relationship is necessarily required; I should have stated that this was one part of Uber's defense, in addition to the driver having agreed not to assault riders and having undergone a safety screening)
Yes, agreed - I should have stated that this was one part of Uber's defense, in addition to the driver having agreed not to assault riders and having undergone a safety screening.
Do you think Uber instructed their drivers to rape people?
According to the article you linked to, a similar case was already tried in 1838, when a boy fell off a wagon, and the master was not guilty of the behaviour of the wagon driver.
If Uber had an internal policy of only ever hiring convicted rapists, didn't tell anyone using the app this, didn't warn about unsafe rides, didn't record ride information, and (crucially) also didn't tell their employees to do anything other than to be decent, good, hardworking drivers -- what do you believe their liability should be in this case? Nothing? I'm trying to "steelman" the implications of your point of view but I'm struggling here. When does liability kick in for you - is it only if they enshrine it as policy to do the criminal act?
I don't think there's anything very complicated here. We don't need to make up unreal scenarios.
For example a company can instruct a truck driver what time he needs to have the goods delivered, then the company is also to blame if he has an accident because the schedule was unfeasible while following safe driving practices.
Or a company which is dumping harmful chemicals into the environment.
A cab driver raping a passenger is unfortunately not an isolated happening, it's not particular to Uber.
But Uber does have a hand in it, by choosing to not properly vet their drivers or lower the risk. Uber is not a marketplace - they choose the drivers and they are, more or less, assigned to you. Uber is their employer.
If the employer makes choices that leads to an unsafe working condition, then that's their responsibility. If that might, potentially, mean the current business model is not viable, well... yeah, too bad so sad. Nobody has a god given right to run a business however the fuck they want.
But I don't think that's the case here. Uber can take steps to mitigate this, it's not like theyve exhausted their options. Frankly, they haven't even tried.
Yes, that's the legal standard. You should read the linked article. A company is only responsible for crimes or injuries their employees commit, if these are part of what they've been instructed to do by the company.
How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
Sure. If Uber was convicted of the crime of rape here, that'd be weird.
They were found civilly liable. Because of things like this:
> Over three weeks, jurors weighed the harrowing personal account of Ms. Dean as well as testimony from Uber executives and thousands of pages of internal company documents, including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
Do you know what that serious safety incident was? I don't. I don't find support in the article of any connection. It could have been reckless driving, or it could have been sexual in nature. What it was makes a lot of difference.
It may surprise you, but a four week jury trial covers a few more bases than a short article can fully detail. That said, this definitely has an answer:
> When matching drivers with riders, Uber uses an AI-powered safety feature called the safety ride assistant dispatch, or SRAD. SRAD gives potential driver-rider matches a score from 0 to 1 based on potential for sexual assault and aims to make matches with the lowest risk.
The article also says that Uber sets various thresholds around this already and that their system flagged it at a score that was "higher than the late night average". What it doesn't tell us is what the threshold is/was for Pheonix, or how that threshold compares to other cities, or even how much higher the score was over the "average". Maybe their threshold for canceling a ride is 0.85, and the late night average is 0.8 in this system. So 0.81 puts the driver over the late night average as per the article and under the threshold for canceling the ride.
Your email provider has systems for detecting spam and removing it from your email. If an email comes into their system and falls under the threshold for being declared spam, but is over the average spam rating for emails in your account, have they done something wrong by allowing it through if it's spam? What if it wasn't spam and they removed it?
These sorts of headlines that espouse a "they knew something and so therefore they are liable" viewpoint seem to me to be more likely to result in companies not building safety measurement systems, or at a minimum not building proactive systems, so that they can avoid getting dragged and blamed for an assault because they chose thresholds that didn't prevent the assault. And not all measurement systems are granular enough or reliable enough to be exposed to end users. Imagine if they built a system that determined that if your driver was from a low income part of town and the passenger lived in a high income part of down the chance of an assault was "higher than the late night average". How long would it be before we saw a different lawsuit alleging that Uber discriminated against minority drivers by telling affluent white passengers that their low income minority drivers were "more likely than average" to assault them? I would hope that this verdict was reached on stronger reasoning than "they had an automated number and didn't say anything" but if it did, none of the articles so far have said what that reasoning was.
> system flagged it at a score that was "higher than the late night average"
Being charitable to the quality of Uber's legal team, I feel they could easily and compellingly have offered this defense.
It's telling that other documentary evidence highlighted that Uber decided sharing its reservations/acting on its system would be detrimental to growth.
And so what messaging do you propose Uber puts in their app for this? "Your driver has a higher than average probability of assaulting you, you may want to wait for another driver"? That will last until the first driver sues for slander. It's one thing to tell you that "prices are higher right now" it's a completely different thing to imply to you that your driver is a criminal.
The article lists a few reasons why. There were some ("some" meaning "thousands of pages", per the article) documents from the company
>....including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
as well as some
>...suggesting that Uber resisted introducing safety features such as in-car cameras because it believed these measures would slow corporate growth.
I would probably have not been included on the jury because I think uber is run by some of the biggest scumbags in the corporate world but if the article is to be believed it's not an unreasonable verdict unless you think no company should be liable for anything that results from their choices and actions.
I mean, it’s not quite that simple, is it? Did they do everything they could to make drivers and passengers safe? Or did they put profits over people’s safety?
From the article:
> internal company documents […] showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her […]
Uber actually had a whole project that produced systems that determine the risk of incidents happening. Could they make rides safer but chose not to? That’s at the core of these lawsuits.
Interesting. When it's the state I think the overwhelming opinion is that predictive policing is dangerous but when it's a private company we actually want it to enforce it?
They could not be held accountable to warn her if they had not done the analysis. They did. Their organizational conclusion was that it was potentially an unsafe trip. Shit, they could have just cancelled the ride dynamically and re-assigned her. Why wouldn’t they do that? It’d probably be more expensive. Maybe they’d get more cancelled rides. Maybe this woman wouldn’t have been raped by an agent of Uber selected for and sent to her by them.
It depends. Are the inputs to the algorithm themselves discriminatory? If so, then yes that would be appropriate. But that is a different conversation. They determined the passenger may be unsafe and did nothing.
Mind you, these companies work very hard for us to not know how they match A to B, usually so we don’t notice things like their disregard for safety.
The inputs wouldn’t even matter; the inputs could even be above reproach but if there were disparate impacts in terms of outcomes, the case for liability could be made.
Oof, this sounds like a case where executives/management who knew about this tool and didn't act upon it should be charged with accessory-to-crime. There has got to be a moral imperative to act upon tools like this.
If one of my electricians accidentally bangs a sprinkler head and thousands of gallons of water dump into the building, my company is responsible for any damages. Obviously we’re insured against these risks, but we’re liable.
There’s almost always a contract that spells it out, but in the situation where there is no explicit contract, I’d expect that we’re still liable.
My electricians are W2 employees and not contractors, and it’s possible that construction has different laws regarding liability than a ride share company that uses contractors, so they’re not equivalent, and I am not a lawyer.
Oh wow, what a bad memory. This exact thing happened in a building I lived in several years ago, a couple of floors above me. It looked like waterfalls outside our windows and water was rushing in under the baseboards. All while every fire alarm in the building was going off and fire truck sirens were blaring outside. Understandably, the fire department would not turn off the water until they had been to every floor to check for fire. On the upside, it's impressive how much water can be delivered by fire sprinklers.
Closer to the topic, the building's management company tried to come after me (a renter) for the expense of the restoration people who were brought in to rip out my drywall and carpet so mold wouldn't form. Maybe they figured tenants were an easier target than the contractor's insurance? Oh, and the management company were the ones who selected and hired the contractors. I had to get very aggressive, with plenty of threats of legal action, to get them to back down. That was fairly easy to do as my state's laws specifically specify liability rules for flooding in multi-tenant buildings. They never did do repairs while I was there - I moved out when my lease expired nearly a year later as they were tying to raise the rent, with drywall still missing.
Oh man, multi-tenant housing sounds like the worst case scenario for this sort of thing. I’m glad you were able to avoid any liability, trying to pin liability for rebuilding a unit on a tenant is insane.
And yeah, the volume of water a fire pump can move is astounding. Electrical code requires the fire pump to be wired so that it can run at its locked rotor amp rating without tripping overcurrent protection and it’s usually tapped directly off the utility transformer separately from the rest of the electrical service. There’s also a smaller jockey pump that maintains water pressure in the system so that when the main pump turns on, there’s no lag with water coming out. The pump motor will keep spinning even if there’s a dead short if it’s fused right above locked rotor amps, since replacing a motor is cheaper than replacing a fully burned out structure and keeping the water flowing allows as many people to escape as possible. The feeder has to be encased in concrete or it has to be fire-resistant cable.
The companies themselves certainly think they do when they give tasks for their workers by dictating the duration, manner, and other terms of employment. Why should they be able to have it both ways? No risk, all reward?
It probably depends on the state but in California, yes. Dog owners there are strictly liable for any injuries caused by their dogs unless the victim was trespassing.
I agree the company shouldn’t be held liable. But Uber doesn’t vet drivers properly because they want driver numbers to be high. I see too many Uber vehicles where the driver doesn’t match the name/photo.
What incentive would there be for a gig company like Uber to not deliberately hire criminals if Uber isn't liable, but other companies could be? Reputational damage isn't enough to hurt the bottom line and to change behavior - if it were, they would've already done more, but they didn't because they were operating under the assumption that they were legally insulated.
The NSA, state and local police departments have been improperly accessing my data for years. The only reason people care about this is because of the (justified) general anger of DOGE. Yet there are far worse offenders, with far more intrusive access.
I don't know why you think people aren't complaining about state and local police accessing data. I've seen these complaints a lot (though the state and local data access is a lot less visible, especially with the gutting of local news)
Who cares? LinkedIn just locked my account (I don't log in often), and is demanding my driver's license to unlock it. Ostensibly to "protect me from identity theft".
That's right. They want me to send my identity documents to some third world contractor to protect me from identity theft. Apparently they're doing this with many people... I'm supposed to be worried about the NSA? I'm not a Russian spy, and I'm no drug cartel leader. The cops and NSA don't give a shit about me. Nor DOGE, come to that.
There is a phrase I like: don't fail with abandon. Just because the NSA broke public trust doesn't make it ok for anything like it to happen again.
This data breach from DOGE is worse in many ways. DOGE employees / contractors are have fewer scruples and guardrails. This data has been used primarily for Trump-and-Company's advantage. All to the detriment of American values, such as being for democracy and reasonable capitalism while standing against authoritarianism and kleptocracy.
The NSA's bulk metadata collection, while later found to violate FISA and likely unconstitutional, operated under a formal legal architecture: statutory authorization via Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act (from 2006 onward), FISA Court orders renewed approximately every 90 days, and at least nominal congressional oversight — though most members were kept uninformed of the program's scope until 2013.
I can't believe people who think this actually exist.
reply