This is the part that I think is kinda genius (although I doubt it was totally intentional) - by making leave accrue and requiring businesses to pay out the value when employees leave, you put a clear dollar value on doing the right thing. You align the employer and the employees interests, so even if a company can't ensure people take leave because it's the right thing to do, they can usually manage it because it's good business
Oh totally, if you are playing by the rules then this can't happen.
What happens if the GOP appoints him as their candidate in 4 years time? Presumably someone asks the supreme court to weigh in, but given it's current make up, what happens if they say "yeah sure, because democrats are The Enemy" or something?
It's just people, breaking the rules is always an option. Rules and laws only work if they are enforceable - and at the end of the day, who would be enforcing that he can't run? The military? State militias?
It's the tech aura. The machines know not to misbehave in his presence because they know what happens to machines that misbehave. It's especially effective on printers, because (as everyone knows) printers are sentient machines imbued with the spirit of a lesser demon, and therefore do experience proper fear.
There are bigots and assholes the same as anywhere else, but you are not likely to see the sort of systematic discrimination like you would in the US. Protection from discrimination by employers or landlords is law, and not especially controversial.
The major issues we have as a country are pretty similar to the rest of the world; our government is a coalition of 3 "conservative" parties which have been trying to undo as much of the social safety net as possible in the name of "efficiency" and "lower taxes" (which only really works if you are wealthy enough to not need the safety net in the first place); the health and education systems are chronically underfunded; and the real estate market is set up for speculators, not people who want a place to live; and the cost of living in general has been increasing dramatically in the past few years.
Standard advice for anyone considering moving; come for a working holiday for a few months before committing to moving here permanently. I love this country, but you are probably going to be in for a bit of a culture shock coming from the US
That's the straw man behind all of this - saying anything in support of the Palestinian people is "pro hamas", saying anything negative about Israel is "antisemitic". It deliberately conflates political groups with ethnic identities to dismiss the argument
I know, who would have thought that destroying everything people value and taking away every semblance of hope for a safe and prosperous future might drive people to undertake dangerous, desperate actions to try and regain some control and structure to their lives
Ok, you've got me on the wording. He wasn't in jail because he paid for hits, but my point being no matter your thoughts on drug policy, Ross should be in prison
Bit of a rambly story, but I swear it is relevant.
So previously I worked as a consultant for a company that manufactured a relatively small number of high value (tens of thousands of dollars each) Gizmos in a lightly regulated industry - the requirements weren't too crazy, basically that everything has a serial number and they can prove that any given serial passed the full range of tests before it left the factory. Pretty much the sort of thing you'd want to have if you gave a crap about quality products anyway.
Initially they were using Excel to keep track of this - they manufactured 10 units a week, it worked well enough. Eventually, they got more successful and needed to scale up to 50 units a week, and it was decided that they needed A System to keep track of testing and manufacturing. Their head of manufacturing "looked around and couldn't find anything off the shelf that was suitable" (ie, cost $0, and perfectly matched his aesthetic tastes; mistake #1), so they decided to build their own system.
They had a few in house developers, but they were focused on building new features (things that drive sales, unlike maintaining their reputation for delivering reliable products), so head of manufacturing decided to get one of the production line techs (who was "good with computers" by virtue of having built the Excel system, but was not a software developer mistake #2) to do it.
Eventually, they decided to use Microsoft PowerApps to build the new system - for those with the good fortune never to have seen PowerApps, it's essentially a "no code required" drag and drop UI tool that you script using Excel formulas. Think Visual BASIC or Scratch, but Cloudy.
On the surface this made sense - the developer was proficient in Excel, so use what you know. Unfortunately, PowerApps is designed to rapidly build throwaway UIs over simple data models and lacks some of the things that actual software developers would have thought to ask about:
It lacks real version control - you can "undo" a deploy, but there is no way to discover what changed between versions, or do branches, or code review
Because you can't effectively manage changes to the system, you can't do pre-production releases
Its native database system doesn't do referential integrity
There is no straightforward way to do any kind of locking - and because there is no referential integrity, it's really easy for concurrent users to really mess up the data
There is no way to do automated testing
The development group could have actually documented how stuff worked, requirements, specs etc but didn't, so any time there was any issue you had to play the game of "is this a bug or bad design?"
Eventually, these chickens came home to roost in the form of a defect that slipped through testing that they then couldn't isolate to a particular batch because none of their testing data could be trusted. I was brought in to try and unpick this mess and advise on a replacement system, but between the cost to fix the issue and the lost sales from it they ended up in a pretty bad spot financially and ended up being acquired by an investment group.
Anyway, the takeaway from this is that you disregard experience and judgement at your own peril, up front savings generally don't manifest in the long term and I expect there is going to be a thriving market of consultants brought in to point and laugh at companies that decided that a bunch of cheap, inexperienced developers and a magic talking parrot would build better software than cheap, inexperienced developers being guided and upskilled by an experienced senior developer
The thing people don't really get about "bullet proof armour" is that it's job is to stop the bullet going into you and messing up your fragile internals - but Newton still wins. The force still has to go somewhere.
Imagine someone held a stake to your chest then someone else smacked it with a sledgehammer - this would be a Very Bad Time for you, what with all the bleeding and internal trauma. If instead someone held you down with a steel plate and that was sledgehammered with the same force - it would hurt like hell, but probably not do the same amount of internal damage because the force is distributed over a wider area. There is of course a limit - at some point the force is still going to be too high and cause fatal damage.
Helmets work the same way - the internals of your head are very fragile, so keeping the bullet out is pretty important, but the same problem exists. The force has to go somewhere, and while getting whacked in the face with a sledgehammer is better than having a stake driven into your forehead it not that much better
Isn't this an admission that the US justice system is fundamentally unjust? Wouldn't it be better if the judicial branch was functional and could update old unjust laws so there were zero people who needed their sentences commuting?
Yikes. I feel sorry for the 3rd party vendors who are going to be getting awkward questions from their clients about why they think that WordPress is going to be a viable platform in the future
Maybe I'm out of the loop, but isn't this the primary corporate entity - the one that owns the trademark, sets the development direction, and ultimately owns the product - essentially announcing that they are abandoning their own product?
This is the part that I think is kinda genius (although I doubt it was totally intentional) - by making leave accrue and requiring businesses to pay out the value when employees leave, you put a clear dollar value on doing the right thing. You align the employer and the employees interests, so even if a company can't ensure people take leave because it's the right thing to do, they can usually manage it because it's good business