IANAL but skimming through the complaint, they're basically acting as a "private attorney general". The lawsuit alleges that Google's policies violate state law. Normally, the state would sue the company, but in this case, the law firm is saying that they'll handle the enforcement for the state. If they're successful, they get a percentage of the penalty.
I don't know how damages are divided up in cases like these, but I'd guess that the state's cut would be distributed (at least partially) to affected employees.
> Because Google requires Googlers to waive their right to seek class-wide injunctive relief for Google’s illegal conduct, the only effective remedy to address Google’s
illegal conduct is the aggressive and full imposition of penalties under the Private Attorneys General Act.
I'd be quite curious if that clause would hold up in court. Forcing employees to give up their right to seek relief for employer misconduct almost certainly is illegal... right?
The logic is punitive vs compensatory damages, medical malpractice is a good example: it's to prevent people trying to get rich by trying to get into malpractice situations and to not start futile suits just hoping for a payout. The idea is that if there isn't a massive payout at the end then the majority of lawsuits would be brought by people who were actually harmed by whoever they're suing and want justice more so than they want to get rich.
This way you reduce the incentive for futile suits and malpractice hunting while keeping the penalties harsh for those who do it.
Compensatory makes sense to go to the claimant but punitive not so much; it's purpose is to make financially unwise to keep whatever practices an entity was found guilty of.
Not sure why this type of thing keeps on popping up as "news". The fact that jobs requiring no skill will be driven down to bad conditions/pay/whatever is sort of axiomatically obvious and inevitable given how capitalism and a more-or-less free labor market works.
Having held one of these shit jobs in the past to get myself through college, I understand how much it sucks, but complaining/negotiating when you have zero leverage simply does not work (in the sense it is very likely not the highest expected value use of your time -- IMO a good way is education, get yourself ready for a slightly better job, repeat until happy).
This entirely depends on what utility you assign to a given amount of money.
For many people who are well-enough off to consider having a good risk floor, the utility of a non-life-changing amount of extra money is nearly zero. It is only once you get into the high jackpots that it gets interesting.
Depending on your situation it can be completely rational to play the lottery or be a startup employee.
This reads like a huge tautology. If you cut down bills people have to pay, they'll have to pay less. Brilliant..?
> The good news is that reducing poverty by cutting monthly expenses would be a big boost for people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, without hurting the middle or the top
Oh, well if you also assume you have a source of money appearing out of thin air (!), then, well, this is just pure genius.
Notice how one of the largest expenses for the poor are energy and transportation. Then note the cost of renewables driving down the cost of energy, and electric cars on a steep cost curve decline.
Technology is deflating costs (to the chagrin of central banks trying to stoke inflation). We must continue to innovate.
Remember, there is no need for poverty if clean energy and automation can provide for everyone's basic needs. We are almost there.
But it does! If you're performing city planning, you should be requiring the installation of solar panels on low income housing. You should be ensuring electric vehicles can be supported (as simple as making a weather proof NEMA dryer plug available for each vehicle parking spot). You must ensure that low income citizens can directly benefit from these cost-reduction technologies.
EDIT:
The only three resources that have been inflating in cost are real estate (can be fixed with policy), education, and healthcare. Those last two can also have their costs driven down with technology.
I agree with you, I'm just disappointed with the article I guess -- it seems to dress up completely banal information as research/news.
For instance it basically says that a largely fixed dollar amount that doesn't vary that much by house, electricity consumption, looks large if you make $10,000 a year but looks tiny if you make $100,000 a year.
I think the point is that the cost of living is exceeding the income of working for most Americans.
The claim have always been that the market makes things cheaper which I would hold is still true. Yet more and more people become working poor because their income doesn't follow the increase in cost of basic necessities.
So something is out of sync and it's worth investigating what that might be.
> This reads like a huge tautology. If you cut down bills people have to pay, they'll have to pay less. Brilliant..?
Au contraire; this is the very essence of what capitalism is. If you employ time preference and amalgamate CAPITAL through savings, chances are that you will be able to use that capital to invest in something – yourself (through skill acquisition), a business, your children, etc.
When this is done iteratively, one outcome is often guaranteed; wealth creation.
As a millennial myself, I'll be the first to admit that when I learnt of Adam Smith's philosophy on free markets and how self-interest is the best way to fuel an economy, I was irked as many others are. However, I've come to agree that economically you'll have a better outcome if you go with praxeology.
A rarity is when you come across an article advocating for forms of laissez faire and fiscal responsibility especially on hacker news. It's refreshing.
Alright, I'll bite, even though I can't vote here, so I suppose my opinion doesn't really matter and I would not say I am a strong supporter of either candidate.
There are many issues with your question ("Why would you support a racist candidate if you weren't also racist").
First, most of what I've heard about Trump being a "racist" is his comments about illegal Mexican immigrants (which is not a race... it's a group of by-definition criminals, since last time I checked illegally entering the US is, well, not legal). Similarly for the more rigorous checks of people coming from countries having known radical islamist ties -- not a race (and FWIW, many leaders across the world are proposing essentially the same thing -- but Trump gets singled out for some reason). People also seem to paint Trump as being very anti-immigration, though I fail to see how Hillary is any better. Neither appears to have any plan to do anything about highly skilled immigrants -- Hillary does have some stop gap measures for non-skill-related immigration (why does this take priority over immigrants who contribute more to the economy..?), but that's about it.
So then, I'm not that convinced he's a racist in the first place, at least not much worse than everyone else. It's not like you're either an angel or a racist -- probably everyone has some unconscious prejudices, and I'm not going to base my rating of people based on how carefully they choose their words. Content not delivery.
But more importantly, it is entirely possible to support a racist candidate even if you are not racist. Simple example: one candidate is racist but has mostly reasonable policies. The other candidate is "not racist" but proposes to nuke all of the world the day they're elected. It's always a tradeoff.
> illegal Mexican immigrants [...] a group of by-definition criminals, since last time I checked illegally entering the US is, well, not legal
Improper entry is a crime, but lots of illegal immigrants aren't guilty of it, but only unlawful presence, which is a civil wrong, not a crime (it is illegal but not criminal -- these things aren't the same.)
Trump's racist credentials go quite a way beyond his comments on illegal Mexican immigrants. For example, there are his comments about judge who allegedly can't do his job because he is "Mexican" (though born in Indiana):
Yes, that his ties to his Mexican heritage would suggest that he would be biased specifically against Donald Trump due to Trump's position on Mexican immigration. This is not a particularly strong argument but it's hardly racist. Racist would be some unconnected national lawsuit controversy where the judge made a questionable decision and Trump said 'what do you expect? he's Mexican.'
The judge in question was a member of an ethnic/activist Hispanic lawyer's group. Imagine if the judge presiding over a case with a prominent African American plaintiff turned out to be a member of 'The Dallas Lawyers Association for White Culture' or something. I doubt that everyone who pointed this out would be considered racist.
As Paul Ryan put it, suggesting that someone can't do their job properly because of their ethnic background is pretty much the textbook definition of racism.
The goals of the California La Raza Lawyers Association are (i) fighting prejudice against Latinos in the legal system and (ii) encouraging Latinos to go into law careers. Swap out 'Latinos' for 'white people' and neither of those goals really makes sense any more, because whites and Latinos in California have different histories and face different problems. For that reason it's unclear what sort of organization the 'Dallas Lawyers Association for White Culture' would be, or what sort of goals it would have. The analogy doesn't make any sense.
Trump has, not surprisingly, been shamelessly lying about the association and trying to paint it as some sort of Mexican supremacist organization. As you might expect, given that it counts a very respectable judge amongst it's members, it is no such thing:
All of this is happening because Trump is a bigot. I think it's quite possible that he believes in the conspiracy theory that he's concocted. However, there have so far been no signs of Curiel doing anything inappropriate:
Paul Ryan's comment completely ignores the context. The job of a judge is to make unbiased decisions. A judge engaged in ethnoactivism may conceivably be biased against a defendant whose political platform runs against those interests. This is simply not a racist claim. The mistake you and Ryan make is to misinterpret it as a much more general claim than it actually is.
You said there was an extensive list of racist comments by Trump, but then the only examples you can bring up are incredibly flimsy. It's therefore hard to take your accusations seriously.
It is an absolutely straightforward example of a racist comment. Trump knows full well that his complaints about Curiel are baseless, so he's lashing out by trying to make something out of the fact that the judge has Mexican parents. In other words, he's using racial insults because he's lost the argument. In legal and logical terms, he might just as well have said that Curiel is a poopy pants.
Quite often there are efforts to weave conspiracy theories around Trump's incoherent ranting. So in this instance, there is some kind of story about how the California La Raza Lawyers Association is a shady "ethnoactivist" group, whatever exactly that is supposed to mean. All of this is just a way of providing cover for another one of Trump's uncontrolled bigoted outbursts. The judge is a member of a completely unremarkable kind of law association. It is no different from a gay judge being a member of an LGBT bar association, or a black judge being a member of a black bar association. Everyone knows that these sorts of organizations have the purpose of tackling specific problems faced by (respectively) LGBT and black people in the legal profession. To say that membership of such an organization can disqualify a judge from a particular case is effectively to say that gay judges can't make judgments on gay issues and black judges can't make judgments on black issues. That would be racism/homophobia par exellence.
By the way, you may recall that Trump has expanded his comments on judges since. He also believes that he could not be judged fairly by a Muslim judge. I wonder what complicated theories people have come up with to try to justify that comment.
It says something quite extraordinary about the present state of the country that there are people willing to defend a Presidential candidate who attacks a federal judge using ugly racist language. Even mainstream Republicans like Paul Ryan don't want to touch this.
It's a simple implication of bias for this particular case. The example of the Muslim judge is also straight forward. No complicated theories or conspiracies are necessary. People whose common sense is not clouded by liberal hysteria can see this.
Donald Trump has offended every ethnic, national and religious group other than white Christian Americans, and thinks that this gives him the right to be tried by a white Christian judge with American parents. Apart from having no legal merit whatsoever, this kind of speculation about possible biases degenerates into incoherence, since there are many different facets to any judge's background and many of them will point in different directions. For example, Curiel was appointed to the state superior court by a Republican governor. Does that mean he shouldn't try the case because, as someone with probable Republican sympathies, he might be biased in favor of Trump? You could fish through Curiel's background and come up with all kinds of speculations about possible biases. Trump chose to take the low road here and throw a bone to his racist supporters by making a totally irrelevant reference to the nationality of the judge's parents. Let's not dignify that disgusting behavior by pretending that Trump was making some kind of legitimate complaint about possible bias. If he had a legitimate complaint, his legal team would be arguing it.
>People whose common sense is not clouded by liberal hysteria can see this.
So Newt Gingrich is clouded by liberal hysteria? He called Trump's comments regarding the judge "inexcusable". And I guess Paul Ryan must be another closet liberal hysteric. It's quite incorrect to paint this as the fringe liberal left vs. common sense. The split of opinion is simply the split between racists and non-racists.
"A defendant, who is running for office on a promise to get tough on Mexican immigration, questioned the neutrality of a judge from a Mexican immigrant family who is presiding over a private lawsuit against the individual."
"A politician, who is running for office on a promise to overturn carbon emissions legislation, called into question the credibility of climate scientist on the grounds that he was of Mexican descent."
Paul Ryan's comment applies to one of those statements, not the other. We don't need to discuss the overall merit of Trump's argument, I'm just saying it's not good evidence of Trump being racist.
(The liberal left is anything but fringe... as far as I can tell, American political discourse is dominated by liberal hysteria, with a few other oddities mixed in like hero worship of the police and military, and unswerving support for Israel. But I digress.)
I'd say that locating Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan on the liberal left is quite a heroic attempt to save that particular argument! If it is really your view that they are left wing liberals, I wonder if your definitions of other terms (e.g. racism) may be so idiosyncratic that a productive discussion is impossible.
As to your comparison between the two statements, it's important to understand first of all that neither of them makes any sense. So in fact it is important to discuss the merits of Trump's argument. As I said before, there are multiple aspects to Curiel's background which point in different directions as to his possible biases. Why is it that Trump chose to focus on unfounded speculations regarding the influence of his ethnicity? Because dogwhistle racism is part of his platform. What he's essentially saying is that the judge is not a "real" American and hence can't be trusted.
The entire edifice of modern liberal politics seems to be built upon the very idea of conscious and unconscious bias on the part of people wielding some fraction of institutional power. Usually it's referred to with terms like 'white privilege' or 'patriarchy.' Calling this out as racist or sexist doesn't get much traction. On HN I even recall repeated discussions on whether white programmers can be trusted construct non-racist algorithms.
People wielding institutional power do have conscious and unconscious biases. It's not racist to point that out. But you do seem to have an unusual definition of the term, so I'm not quite sure what you have in mind there. Are you trying to suggest a comparison with what Trump is doing? If Trump has evidence that institutions controlled predominantly by people with Mexican ancestry are systematically discriminating against white Americans, then he should make it public.
You seem to have contradicted yourself. You admit that people wielding institutional power (who would surely include judges) can make decisions affected by conscious or unconscious biases, and it's not racist to point this out. Case closed.
It is not racist to point out institutional racial biases when there is evidence for their existence. It is racist to make baseless speculations about an individual person's biases simply because of their ethnicity. It's the difference between pointing out that black Americans are more likely to be involved in violent crime than white Americans (not racist) vs. assuming that a particular individual is going to commit a violent crime simply because they are black (racist).
The algorithm discussion is too vague to really engage with, but it's presumably possible that a person's biases could influence their choice of algorithm in certain instances. If we're talking about, say, an algorithm for matching profiles on okcupid, then certain biases of the programmer might "leak" into the design of the algorithm. You could argue semantics over whether the algorithm itself is really "biased", but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the discussion you linked to.
Last summer I was playing a fun little game on my iPhone and kept causing problems for other people on the same Wi-Fi network just me. It turned out that when you dismissed a video ad is soon as possible to skip it, it seemed to keep downloading the ad anyway. And then maybe some more. I don't know, but it was a huge data hog on Wi-Fi.
If that happened on cellular (I didn't play much while out and about, and it may have changed its behavior on cell) it could've easily racked up a huge bill. And that would be the developers fault.
In the two weeks I've been playing Pokémon go my iPhone says I've used 150 MB of data. I've been looking at it a lot as I drive around (whenever I stop in a parking lot), and I often leave it running while driving (to get those fake steps when I'm going slow enough) and it hasn't done much so I don't think the game is missbehaving. Given that it seems to have to constantly reload landmarks in areas I frequent some cashing might be a good idea, but it's not too horrendous.
The "best and brightests" do that too. I once wanted to test out the Google Photos app. I installed it... and it basically killed every Wi-Fi network I happened to be on - whether home or the local Hackerspace. In the few minutes I spent trying to find the source of the problem, it managed to push 4GB of data over the wire... even though I only had like 1.2GB of actual photos on my device!
