Rottcodd

I didn't know that, but I'm cynically unsurprised.

A curious fact adjacent to that:

The US tobacco settlement is still ongoing. Each year, tobacco companies have to pay a particular amount of money to state governments, nominally to help offset the societal costs of smoking.

The total amount of the payments made to a specific state in a specific year depends on the number of cigarettes sold in that state the previous year. Not tobacco products in general, but cigarettes specifically.

It's safe to assume that that's relevant.

The system as a whole.

Huh.

It took me a while to sort out that meme, then it suddenly hit me - I've not only succeeded in eliminating the tankies from my Lemmy experience, but have done so so effectively that I started to forget that they even exist.

At this point, the only people I see trying to defend Russia are a handful of angry right-wing morons who have bought in to the propaganda spread by Russia's assets in the GOP, and they're few and far between.

It's so incredibly obvious that that would happen that I sincerely believe that that's part of the intent.

Not to mention that all of this noise about flavored vape juice being some sort of underhanded scheme to rope in kids is one of the most ridiculously dumbass things that I've ever seen gibbering idiots apparently sincerely claim to believe. Well - this side of Qanon at least...

When I started vaping, premixed juice was the exception rather than the rule. So what you generally bought was nicotine extract, propylene glycol and/or vegetable glycerin, AND FLAVORING. Flavoring it was the standard literally from day one.

Nicotine juice is flavored and has been flavored all along for two very simple reasons: first and foremost because on its own, it tastes like crap, and second because everybody - not just kids but EVERYBODY - likes for things to taste good.

I am so fucking tired of assholes and idiots.

How thoroughly bizarre.

Does this guy actually live in a fantasy world in which, to him, the US supplying arms to Ukraine to aid Ukraine in fighting a defensive war in response to a Russian invasion of their country equals American aggression? How does that even work?

Russia invaded Ukraine.

It's just that simple. That's not an interpretation or an opinion - it's an undeniable fact.

Russia invaded Ukraine.

That's a clear, obvious, blatant act of aggression. In fact, it could likely be said that, internationally, there is no single thing that's more clearly an act of aggression than one country invading another one. The exact thing that Russia did.

So how on Earth does this guy spin that into US aggression?

Quite seriously, I can only conclude from this that this guy, and whoever else is behind this, is literally insane. That must be the case pretty much no matter what. Either he's so insane that he genuinely believes that defending a country against a foreign power's invasion is "aggression," or he's so insane that he'll brazenly (and at great length) lie and claim that that's what he believes.

How did it come to this? How is it even possible for literal insanity to be presented as valid political opinion?

It's just so... bizarre.

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.

No shit. It's likely that staying in office is the only thing keeping him out of prison.

That's not the only reason the war is being prolonged though. The other notable reason is that there can be no defined point at which it's over simply because Israel has no intention of ever leaving Gaza.

I know Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to refer to a specific dynamic with social media, but what he described is really just a particular example of a more fundamental process that happens to virtually all notably successful companies. And this is a prime example of it.

In the beginning, the company gains success by offering a quality product that people want at a reasonable price. They actually provide a product or service the people want at terms with which they'll agree, and thereby succeed, and that's where the focus is.

But along the way, they pick up a layer of essentially parasitic executives and shareholders who are paid obscene amounts of money mostly just for having achieved their positions. They bring little if anything of value to the company - they just funnel enormous sums of money into their own and each other's pockets.

And then the focus changes. It goes from winning customers through offering the best possible service or product at the best possible price to maximizing revenue with which to pay grotesquely inflated salaries and dividends to a relative few by offering the shittiest possible service or product at the highest possible price, and counting on market share, lack of competition, name recognition and inertia to keep the company going in spite of the fact that it's now... enshittified.

And that's what we're seeing at Spotify right now.

See also : Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Google...