No - it’s actually not like that at all.
Google didn’t pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.
Mm… no. It’s really not.
The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.
So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.
So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you’re free to go.
Ah yes - the man who still has to have the vote rigged even after arranging for the murders of his opposition speaks on democracy…
Israel has rather obviously been using the attention on Gaza as cover for stepping up their efforts in the West Bank, even going so far as distributing automatic weapons to the illegal settlers, with which the settlers then entirely unsurprisingly went on a murderous rampage.
Just another aspect of the profound evil of Zionism.
Seriously - how can any person be so brazenly and thoroughly warped?
I can only assume that, like so many of the fabulously wealthy, she’s profoundly mentally ill, such that she really can’t grasp the enormous human cost that fulfilling her petty, selfish and ultimately pointless desires would entail. It can only be the case that she genuinely can’t grasp the fact that the millions of people who would be made to suffer or die for this are actual people - actual beings with lives and loved ones who are every bit as important to them as hers are to her.
It’s either that or she’s genuinely evil, in the purest sense of the word, and on a scale the world has rarely seen.
So which is it Ms. Adelson? Are you insane or simply evil? There’s absolutely no doubt - none at all - that it’s one or the other.
Naturally.
There are two main ways in which people can try to further a political position they’ve taken - they can either argue for the position or they can attempt to discredit those who argue against it.
If the position they’re trying to further is so illogical or immoral that they can’t frame any arguments in its favor, then attempting to discredit its opponents is the only thing they have left.
Best of luck to them.
It’s true in essentially all industries, but it’s especially obvious in rideshare that there’s a layer of parasites who get paid far too much money for nothing beyond the fact that they won the fight for the position of “parasite who gets paid far too much money for doing nothing.”
Anything that might even just decrease the number of overpaid parasites would be a benefit not just to the concerned industry, but to society as a whole.
Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies…
And it’s certainly not a coincidence that those isolationist and extremist policies are being actively promoted by the MAGA Republicans.
The survivors, after the ones that Israel has already killed and the many, MANY more the deaths of whom by malnutrition and disease they’re currently very deliberately engineering.
Yes.
Broadly, the whole situation is only murky and complex if you grant some credence to Israel’s rhetoric. If you start with the presumption that Netanyahu and his hard-right cronies are lying and that conquest has been the goal all along (and not just from the beginning of the current hostilities but for years now), then everything falls neatly into place and it all makes perfect sense.
That’s certainly not a coincidence.
That’s rather obviously been one of Israel’s primary goals from the start - to destroy as much infrastructure as possible, to create as much hardship as possible for the Palestinians.
And rather obviously, that’s in service to their longer term goal of taking full and direct control of Gaza. They want to render it uninhabitable, so that they can cast their planned occupation as a practical or even humanitarian necessity, rather than what it in fact is - brazen, and brazenly illegal, conquest.
The central point to keep in mind as far as all of that goes is that Netanyahu and his hard-right cronies have, at every turn, entirely rejected a two-state solution and any form of Palestinian autonomy. To just the degree necessary to maintain a PR facade, they claim that conquest is not their intent, but if it’s not going to be a two-state solution, conquest is literally the only alternative, so it is and can only be their actual goal, and their claims to the contrary are and can only be quite simply lies.
And not coincidentally, the wholesale destruction of Gazan infrastructure in which Israel has self-evidently engaged fits right in with that interpretation.
I think it’s long past time for a serious international conversation about profoundly mentally ill politicians.
Already did, though instead of the bot, I blocked the entire instance.