You don't sign a contract buying something in the supermarket, yet a contract is still formed. You negotiated or discussed with the employer about pay and responsibilities, of course they are part of any such contract and their option is to dismiss you, not unilaterally change the terms.
There is a big misunderstanding here; you seem to believe that because Hezbollah is so invariably coupled with civilian life and has by own decision foregone uniforms and other basic traditional military structures, this somehow raises the requirements for Israel to strike them. The opposite is true.
I want to push back on this because I am making a stronger claim. This kind of argument came up a lot in the Gaza conflict, and pulled in proportionality arguments and discussions about Hamas embedding military assets deliberately in vulnerable civilian targets. I'm saying none of that happened here. I don't believe (but I could be wrong, as I often am) that Israel just killed a bunch of Hezbollah medics and schoolteachers. They attacked, with great specificity, actual soldiers of a military peer with whom they are in open conflict.
I believe you can rules of engagement under IHL straight off the ICRC's documents; that this isn't even a tricky case.
“Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.”
Did you know UK tax law makes every scheme whose primary purpose is tax avoidance tax evasion? Courts are not generally very impressed by them - which is why it requires a captured government (Ireland) to do them and ideally some sort of multinational scheme so every challenge is a hugely difficult endeavour.
> Did you know UK tax law makes every scheme whose primary purpose is tax avoidance tax evasion?
This is the kind of law politicians pass thinking they're being clever when they're really just being incoherent.
If the government makes renewable energy a tax deduction and then you invest in renewable energy to get the tax deduction, that's tax avoidance. The primary purpose of making the investment is to reduce your tax burden and if it wasn't a deduction (i.e. it didn't allow you to avoid taxes) then you'd have bought the power from the power company instead. But causing you to change your behavior in order to avoid taxes is the purpose behind making that a tax deduction.
If you're deciding where to put your facility and the decision comes down to which jurisdiction has a lower tax rate, that's tax avoidance. You're avoiding taxes in the higher tax jurisdiction by putting your operations in the lower tax jurisdiction. But that is likewise the intended purpose of the lower tax rate. That jurisdiction wants businesses to set up there, or wants local businesses to have more money so they build more facilities and hire more local people etc.
If the government raises the tax on cigarettes and that causes you to quit smoking... you get the idea.
It makes no sense for it to be illegal for you to do the thing the government intentionally passed law to give you the incentive to do. But more than that, how are they supposed to prove it? They claim you quit smoking to avoid the tax, you claim it was because you didn't want to get cancer.
Hypothetically they could uncover some email in which you were complaining about the high taxes before you quit, but that doesn't actually prove anything -- the tax could make you chafe even if your primary purpose was to avoid cancer. Moreover, the well-counseled entity is not going to write that email, which makes it a law against writing something down rather than a law against doing something, and those are the worst because the evil megacorps who know they're doing something shady make sure to cross all their t's and the ones who get punished are the guileless ones who didn't know there was effectively a law against complaining about taxes.
I only found out recently that animated film company Laika was created after Nike founder Phil Knight bought his son a new career after he failed at being a rapper.
He bought into Will Vinton studios and then forced Oscar winning animation pioneer Will Vinton out of his own company.
If I recall, it turns out that his "failed rapper" son had some sort of natural talent for this and has got nothing but accolades even from other animators ever since. Although I do get your point.
Wow, I didn't make the last name connection until reading this thread. The Wikipedia page[1] for Annapurna Pictures doesn't even mention that the founder is the child of a billionaire. It just kind of implies the founder dabbled in film school for two semesters, went off to travel the world, and then -poof- a media production company is conjured into existence. Pretty rosy depiction of nepotism.
Until she got bored, anyway. You know, I also feel I have "grown secluded" from my day job.
> After a series of underperforming productions, in 2019 Ellison had grown secluded from Hollywood, leaving Annapurna to be mostly ran by Nathan Gary, who led Annapurna Interactive before being promoted to president. She left to Lanai, a Hawaiian island owned by her father, and remained there as the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to remain isolated.
It's just as weird that it happens twice in Hollywood today. Another of Larry Ellison's nepo baby heirs runs Skydance, which has had a bit more success in "blockbuster" terms (and has recently been flirting with buying CBS Viacom aka Paramount).
I suspect a lot of it has to do with who you surround yourself with, and how much agency you give them.
One word that rich people almost never hear, is “no.” Even really nice ones don't hear it often.
That means that almost any rectally-sourced, harebrained idea they squeeze out, is treated as genius, by their entourage.
I know a number of fairly wealthy people, and some of them won’t have anything to do with me, because I say the “N” word. Others, actually ask me what I think.
People rapidly learn that asking me for my input means getting an answer that is honest, but not one they might want to hear (and that answer might be "I don't know.").
They don’t always give it much weight, but at least they ask.
Those folks are not always the ones you might consider “nice,” though.
Just anectdata, though, and the community we share has some traits that reward Honesty and seeking counsel from others.
Do yourself a favour and read the Tom Bower biographies of him, e.g. Branson: Behind The Mask
In fact, you can a get a good understanding of him indirectly through the testimony in Tubular Bells: the Mike Oldfield storyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?t=877&v=UQLDGpcgNTM e.g. John Giddings says of Branson "He was a chancer. He was prepared to gamble and go for it. He was percieved as a visionary, putting it all together, but really he was importing records illegally and flogging them, right? He was a second-hand car salesman."
Fun Fact: Richard Branson had such an antagonistic relationship with Mike Oldfield, that Oldfield included a segment in one of his albums where he plays a guitar with staccato notes that spelled out "Fuck Off R.B." in morse code[1], recording under Branson's own label.
That doesn't necessarily mean he was a not-nice person.
He's actually fairly well-known for treating his employees well. One of the reasons his TV show wasn't so popular, was because he wasn't into pitting the contestants against each other, and firing the losers.
The comment did not make clear she bought the position. It almost seemed more like it was implying anyone who is family of some rich guy can't accomplish anything themselves.
I recently had a fire alarm with a failing battery and their way of telling you about the battery problem is a single loud warning beep every 70 or so seconds (something irregular of course), just enough to wake you up to an entirely silent room. Battery voltage was right on the edge and the detection circuit hopelessly naive so it would generally only beep at night when temperatures fell, often not even repeatedly. Horrible product.
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