As a former investigator:

This is astonishing. Not that Starr is a horrible person, but that’s he’s a useless attorney.

Uhh, I’m pretty sure the president of a fairly large and significant university has an administrative staff, some of whom would have access to his e-mail for the sole purpose of screening the messages that come in. Pretty sure that person would click the little red flag next to “I Was Raped At Baylor”

Yeah, that’s not even as good as Art Briles’ defense in his statement to Hays. Briles is basically leaning on 3 points:

Did Spaeth honestly think that the station would just ignore the first two answers and go with the third answer? Didn’t either of them see the red light on the camera through all this and realize, “Oh crap, we’re so screwed?”

Ken Starr’s world:

They’re not employees they are contractors. Uber and Lyft are screwed up companies. They sell it as “people making extra money with their cars. This is in part a fallacy. Many people “rideshare” as a full time gig. Myself included. Because of this I have zero problem with having to jump through that hoop. If they can…

But people don’t like having to do stuff. Or something.

It’s easy and cheap in Texas. We have to get fingerprinted for our carry permit so fingerprint services are at every other gun range.

I recently needed to get a finger print background check here in Austin in order to sit for the bar. I have to tell you that you are wrong about needing to go to a government office. These fingerprint checks are done by a business with offices all over the city. You can set up an appointment online and go in and it…

a database would be elementary to a company spending millions on lobbying and who has been caught tracking riders for party entertainment

I just took my first Uber ride from downtown Austin back to my house. It was no cheaper than a taxi.

So they say “fuck it,” so what? I mean we’re talking about getting fingerprinted. It’s really not that big of an ask if you want to make a living driving strangers around town for money. Or as a second job or whatever. If taking 30 minutes out of your day once is such an insurmountable task, maybe you ought to look…

Austin is a much more developed area than whatever podunk town you live in. Besides the businesses that only do fingerprints, you can walk into any gun shop and usually be fingerprinted right away.

A judge is California recently ruled that Uber can be sued for sexual attacks committed by its’ drivers. You really think that’s going to be less expensive in the long run than maintaining a database?

If getting your fingerprints for a background check is hard for you, then I sure as shit wouldn't want you as an employee. They have places that do it electronically now and it takes 10 minutes with an appointment.

No it’s not. It is exactly the same. You get a job with Uber or Lyft because you want/need extra money. After our son was born, my wife wanted to quit her job and stay home with him but our budget didn’t allow it. The daycare idea was perfect. It didn’t pay as much, but it covered the difference between what she would…

Five...ten...what...dollars? I mean someone has to add two whole data elements to the database. A multi billion dollar company definitely cannot handle what I do at my small business in 5 minutes!

Hey, getting welfare is just as a PITA, why should drivers seeking employment not go through the same background checks?

Except that’s really just the excuse, Uber’s using legal loopholes to fuck both their customers and their “contractors”, and in some cases they also fuck the cities they operate in for good measure (some cities restrict the availability of taxi licenses to control traffic, for instance), because libertarianism, and…