I wish I had some mod points.

Fun fact: If you add -pinterest to the end of Google searches, you don't get any links to them.

Irrelevant to whether or not an employee qualifies as exempt.

Yes. They're called salaried non-exempt. (Also, the designation of professional has a specific meaning under federal labor law, which doesn't really apply to programmers, who have their own legal definition. "Professionals," in that sense, are people who are either licensed by the government in some way, or require specific education, like a university degree. In other words, doctors, lawyers, and engineers.)

If they do not qualify as exempt (and simply tracking their hours is sometimes sufficient for that), overtime must be a minimum of 150% of normal wages, and other than for public sector (non-exempt) employees, comp time is illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act. But wage theft is, in fact, quite common, yes. (And if they are exempt, comp time is irrelevant, since you're not supposed to be tracking their hours at all.)

Federal law, however, does not vary anywhere in the US.

Not really, no. They mostly moved to Florida a long time ago. Again, you've obviously never been to LA.

Statistically speaking, very unlikely.

A random selection filtered down to people who can devote weeks, if not months, to jury duty without sufficient hardship to get excused. That generally means either wealthy (and they never bother to even show up, why would they?) or unemployed people, often chronically unemployed, and in southern California, that is a demographic that leans pretty hard left. And it is very, very fashionable on the left to hate on tech bros these days.

LA has all sorts of crazies, yes.

And once both sides use up their peremptory challenges, it's up to the judge to rule on for-cause challenges. And superior court judges are either appointed by the governor (and therefore, 100% political appointees) to fill a vacancy, or (re)elected for six year terms, which is a 200% political process. California judges always reflect the ideology of their community, and there are very, very few places in the United States as left as LA.

You've obviously never been to southern California. Especially LA.

In what delusional fantasy world is paying hourly bonus money not linked to hourly performance?

You can't pay an hourly bonus without tracking hours. There is case law (at the federal level) that says that if you track hours, they're an hourly employee. It's a minefield, whatever you call it, because you're still tracking hours.

(And overreach is a specialty of the California labor board, especially when it comes to reclassifying exempt employees as non-exempt. Because it's a very easy win.)

If you're paying salaried employees by the hour, they're not salaried employees. Even if you're only paying extra. Looks suspicious.

Only salaried employees can be exempt.

And yes, in California, the judge will side with the employee, because the labor board doesn't care about employees any more than anywhere else, but they live to screw over employers in any way possible for the slightest reason.

Mostly, in the wallet.

In general, so do I. But a) most juries are not dealing with trillion dollar companies run by people regularly referred to as robotic, and b) this is California, and worse, southern California, and worst of all, Los Angeles, the more wretched hive of sum and villainy.

I've read that book. Or, rather, several of those books. Most of the movies based on that premise aren't very good, though.

I'm reminded of Apollo 13. Nixon had a speech prepared for their successful return. He also had a speech for their death in space. Probably more than one.

So, yeah, Trump has a speech for aliens contact. Probably more than one, for friendly aliens, hostile aliens, attacking aliens, refugee aliens running from their enemies, and any other scenario science fiction has thought of for the last hundred years.

They're probably the same speeches Biden had, and Obama, and every other President for decades, at most, polished for this delivery style.

As I said, it doesn't matter. They could literally resurrect dead babies on live television and the jury would find against them because they have a lot of money. Or they could eat live babies on television, and the appeals will go exactly the same, with the SCOTUS ruling being based solely on who sits on the court at the time.

Facts only matter in a legal case. This isn't a legal case. It's a political case, and facts are literally not allowed to matter.

In the end, Meta will lose, regardless of the facts or the law. They will lose because a California jury will look at the amount of money Meta has, and decide to take as much of it away as possible. I'll predict a billion dollar verdict or more, if Jesus personally came down to testify that, being God, and knowing everything about everyone, had Personally created man to not be capable of becoming addicted to Facebook. Facts simply don't matter.

The appeals will go on for years, and in the end, the only thing that matters is who holds the majority on the Supreme Court in the end.

At least there are differences between different blends of toxic bean waste.

One study, using an fMRI scan to detect activity in the part of the brain that experiences pleasure from taste, involved giving test subjects a test of two wines, one they were told cost $10/bottle, the other, $90/bottle. The fMRI scan showed they physically enjoyed the more expensive wine more than the cheap one. The trick, of course, was the both glasses were poured from the same bottle.

In many circles, so are companies that sell thousand dollar speaker cables with directional arrows, and wood tuner knobs, and all the other things audiophiles literally can't tell the difference they make if they don't know it's there.

You have a point? No? Didn't think so.

Bose recommends standard lamp cord.