Those `rare edge cases` you're marginalizing represent real people's lives.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article41364675.html

I gotta say, It's a struggle for me to read these threads and see people who share your callous comfort with the status quo.

They are in fact rare cases, and the cases where those people are denied the desired opportunity to drive for Uber are even rarer. More people are raped --- set aside sexually assaulted --- in taxi cabs every year than are denied this opportunity.

It is obviously a real problem that people are placed on sex offender registries for peeing in bushed. But the commenter above isn't required to address every real problem in pointing out that there's a good public policy reason to avoid having people convicted of real sexual assault offenses driving cabs.

I think it is upto the ridesharing company to set the standards and not an arbitrary bureaucrat. In fact I believe people like you and me might be able to invent better methods of detecting people of dubious characters and can deny them job.

At a guess, I bet the register has large fractions of serious criminals and also your "rare" edge cases.

The probability that someone doing one of these minor things getting on the register might be low. But the number of people doing them in the first place will roughly compensate.

Anyway, laws where there is a low probability of a serious (and over the top) punishment are bad. For one thing they don't work well as incentives. Worse, they are most likely to hit the disadvantaged, low status people who have less leverage to officials to look the other way.

> Nearly all people on the sex offender registry actually did something that justifies being on there.

Citation? I don't necessarily doubt it's true, but 'nearly all' can be completely relative. I'd like to see actual numbers for a statement like that.

As far as I'm concerned, just 1% is enough for me to question whether this is a reasonable metric and 10% would be "this is utter garbage"

Indeed, of the things I've read, the sex offender registry is quite flawed.[0]

[0] https://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/2013/09/02/the-wrongfull...