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.
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.”