I think it’s a joke about physicists not understanding tolerances.
I remember hearing an old story about a company buying signs from a contractor. The contractor produced all kinds of things, so it was fairly straightforward to send them the CAD file and stop worrying about it. One manager did an audit, and realized they were paying hundreds of dollars each for these basic signs. They weren’t fancy or anything, and were just signs throughout the facility that got updated regularly. So why the hell were they paying so much for what should have been a simple print job?
After some investigating, the manager discovered it was because the company didn’t want to hire an artist to design the signs; They just had one of their engineers do it. And the engineer who did the design forgot to change their default tolerances from 3/1000 of an inch. So to comply with the order as written, the contractor was busting out calipers and meticulously measuring the spacing and sizing on each letter before it shipped out the door.
Exactly this. Any kind of settlement does a massive disservice to the people whose wages were stolen.
When people complain about white collar crime going unpunished, this is exactly what they’re referring to. Wage theft is larger than every other form of theft combined. It literally accounts for more than 51% of all theft. But it largely goes unpunished, and is treated like a civil issue instead of criminal.
If a cashier steals $100 from the cash register, they’ll be leaving their shift in handcuffs. But if that same company routinely and systematically steals $100 from every single employee by rounding their timesheets down, netting them millions of dollars in excess profits by the end of the fiscal year… It’s treated as a civil issue, the business gets fined 10% of the profits they made, and the individual employees see virtually none of it after the lawyers get their take. The company treats it as a cost of doing business, and changes nothing in the future.