Gosh, they’re probably going to spend hours’ worth of revenue on settlements, I guess that makes it alright then.
You’re right, if I spread out the reports, I probably could report 30 cars stolen before I get found out. Then what happens when law enforcement finds out? Are they going to ask me nicely to stop and let me spend a few hours’ wages settling with the victims? Hell no! I’ll probably spend the next ten years being extradited from one state to another, assuming the Feds ever let me go after convicting me for dozens of counts of interstate crime.
If you made as much money per hour as Hertz does then it would likely only cost you a few hours of wages too. It might even cost you less because not being some "faceless corporation" is an advantage in court and you'd have more bargaining power when negotiating settlements.
Hertz will probably wind up paying more than any normal individual would because Hertz has far more money. You can't extract blood from a stone but Hertz is no stone so the lawyers will sink their teeth in.
These people being arrested was likely not the result of intentional action or negligence by Hertz. If they're anything like every other BigCo this is a known low priority but that nobody expected could result in something like this so it hasn't been fixed.
You keep trying to compare this to some malicious or comically negligent individual filing police reports but that comparison is absurd because no individual has the massive reach that Hertz does so no individual could file 30ish false police reports without noticing whereas a corporation where everyone is just doing their job without seeing the bigger picture could do that.
You’re telling me that this is not negligence, but at the same time this was probably a known problem they did nothing to fix? I don’t think those two statements are compatible.
My whole point is that the comparison should not be absurd. Giant companies get all the advantages of being treated as a single legal entity but with none of the downsides. They’re giant machines for laundering responsibility. What’s absurd is that you can falsely imprison people and get away with it clean because “everyone is just doing their job.”
>You’re telling me that this is not negligence, but at the same time this was probably a known problem they did nothing to fix?
You're on a board called Hacker News and you don't understand the difference between a known bug and establishing that bug as the root cause of bad things that are actually happening in production. I think you're being willfully ignorant for the sake of your own argument.
Everyone with a large code base has thousands of known bugs with low priority because they are now known to be negatively affecting the system. There simply are not the resources to fix all these bugs. Nobody knows which ones (if any) are can actually cause bad things to happen until those bad things actually happen and get traced back to one of the known, low priority bugs.
Simply put, they probably knew there was a bug, they didn't know that bug could ever lead to people being falsely imprisoned until it actually happened.
>They’re giant machines for laundering responsibility.
I generally agree with that.
>What’s absurd is that you can falsely imprison people and get away with it clean because “everyone is just doing their job.”
The cops bear some blame here too. Hertz didn't imprison anyone. Part of the cop's job is to act as a filter for BS police reports. When you pull someone over who claims to have legitimately rented the rental that should get you to start asking further questions. Two organizations screwed up here.
When you said “this is a known low priority” I thought you were referring to the false police reports. I guess you were referring to a bug in a computer system? I’m not talking about bugs. At some point, someone had to inform the police that these cars were “stolen.” Either someone involved in that process negligently failed to make damned well sure the car was really stolen before making the report, or someone elsewhere in the company negligently failed to design a process where people would do this.
Mistakes do happen. If this was a one-off, or even a two or three-off, I could buy that. But at some point on your way to thirty false arrests, it stops being a regular mistake and starts being negligence. You can blame a computer glitch a couple of times, but after that it becomes your fault for trusting the known-glitchy computer.
You’re right, if I spread out the reports, I probably could report 30 cars stolen before I get found out. Then what happens when law enforcement finds out? Are they going to ask me nicely to stop and let me spend a few hours’ wages settling with the victims? Hell no! I’ll probably spend the next ten years being extradited from one state to another, assuming the Feds ever let me go after convicting me for dozens of counts of interstate crime.