“ In December, Singh pleaded guilty to 499 charges, including dozens of fraud and overcharging offences, along with seven counts of assaulting disabled passengers.
He was also convicted of cramming the taxi with up to four passengers in wheelchairs instead of the legal limit of two, blowing a blood alcohol concentration of 0.191 and failing to safely secure his passengers’ chairs while the taxi was moving.
In convicting the 57-year-old and sentencing him to a two-year community corrections order and a $20,000 fine, magistrate Kieran Gilligan said laws governing taxi drivers should be reformed to allow courts to more easily impose jail terms.”
I know this is a dumb question, but how the Fark can this bloke commit hundreds of fraud acts, attack disable people and drive a taxi around p1ssed to the gills ?
How hasn’t he been beaten to a pulp or worse?
Have these disabled people got no family?
I would deadset cave his head in with a tyre lever if it was one of my family members who was attacked
I’m old, like old enough to have had a bit of a life pre social media and pre smart phone. Particularly the former but also the latter.
Does anyone else feel like life was genuinely on the balance better before this technology?
Or is it just some old guy reminiscing about the good old days?
I mean I can not(and I don’t really) use social media and can put the phone down.
But that’s not the same anymore when the world you then interact with is kind of on socials and their phone as well. Or has sorta been rewired too it as well.
Thankfully my dog doesn’t have a phone or social media account.
If nothing else, it has delivered more continuous schooling for kids prevented from attending school ( for us, during Covid lockdowns, for others in conflict zones, such as kids in Ukraine and Gaza, Israel shutting down UNRWA run schools in the West Bank)
I have loved technology since I was a kid. I was on FaceBook when few knew what it was, though I have actively refused to use it for years. I was using Google when most people were still using AltaVista.
And yet, I feel sorry for my kids who never knew what it was to disappear with your friends all day on a Saturday, with no one knowing where you were, as long as you were home for dinner.
I’m not sure if it’s technology that makes things worse. I suspect it’s more the prevalence and availability of news, which is predominantly bad news. Maybe a little of each.
Yeah I feel like there was a golden age for the internet. Like late 90s early to mid 00s when places like blitz, other internet forums etc popped up.
Reckon it’s more the birth of “the algorithm “, doom scrolling and the suck of a smart phone putting the internet into your hands instead of on the computer maybe.
Just feel technology went from being cool and fun too exploitive.
Like computer scientists hooked into psychology to make things addictive rather than helpful.
Just musing over it now as I take various actions in my life to say limit screen time.
Why is that even a thing? (I mean I know why, but it’s not cool)
Free forums/social media did have an early golden age, where they seemed mostly positive. But inevitably, free services, which had to be monetised, turned us into the product that was being sold to big companies. And we were naive about how effective algorithms would be at influencing us at the behest of businesses paying for our attention.
The solution is pretty easy. Pay for these services as users. But it seems we’re victims of our own love of a bargain.
