How does someone pay a fine of a huge amount of money that they'll never be able to repay?

That article doesn’t read at all like they think it’s a joke. It’s an uncritical exposition of the man’s claims that he’s being persecuted by the Israeli authorities.

One of my employees got a judgment against him, and I got paperwork from the courts that said he was essentially allowed to gross the Maine minimum wage, but anything he earned above that I was supposed to send to the other party. I was allowed to deduct $2 per pay period (from my employee’s now much more meager wages) to cover my time and expenses for doing this. I had no choice or say in the matter, nor did my employee. I was quite hot about it, actually. It wouldn’t have been a huge deal if he was a salaried guy, but he was hourly and his check was different every week and I don’t like the extra work.

The whole judgement was less than $3000, so I wound typing up a promissory note, paying it off for him, and he paid me back.

To be fair, in the headline, the phrase “cannot leave Israel for 8,000 years” is in quotation marks, suggesting that they are quoting someone involved in the story (and, thus, those words aren’t those of the Guardian itself). That said, those words don’t appear in a quote in the article itself, so yeah, it is at least kind of clickbait-ish.

The fact that somebody said something does not make it good journalistic practice to quote it in a headline. If the content of the quote is obviously nonsense, it’s shoddy journalism and clickbait.

Okay, so that post about the Guardian click-bait headline should probably have gone in that Hilarious Headlines thread. :slight_smile:

In recent years if you win an Oscar you can only sell it back to the academy. You agree to this when you win. Prior to this policy Oscars can be sold to anyone and many are not owned by the winner.