How dare the people who create your revenue streams demand reasonable working conditions?

Of course employers are welcome to set the terms under which they'll give us money. And similarly, we're free to set the terms under which we'll accept their money. That's how it works.

Personally, I love companies announcing draconian new RTO policies - There aren't many better indicators their stock price is going to spike short-term then tank a few quarters later. But that has nothing to do with working for those companies. On that front, it's just a hard "no", to the point I'm seriously considering becoming a professional "interview troll" once I retire!

I hate ads more than the average bear, but I have to admit, I have no idea where people are seeing these either. Are "ads" someone intentionally loads and watches really ads, or are they merely short-form content?

That said, if these are everywhere and the very fact I'm using FF with uBlock Origin is the exact reason I haven't seen these... That is the sort of viral advertising most companies dream of.

There's a fuckton of cigarettes manufactured every year. "If all your friends jumped off a bridge"... Good riddance!

LPT: You can also turn your phone to watch the content. I know, mind blown, right? Pass it along!

I'm not saying I would or wouldn't take this particular buyout, but as you point out, it's not a safe assumption the default severance would be the same absent this artificially sweetened offer. At a quick glance, New Jersey is the only US state that requires any severance at all, beyond making employees whole for time worked and paying out accrued PTO. Many do have additional requirements around mass layoffs, but nothing comes anywhere near two weeks per year of service. Even NJ, as the best-of-the-best (honestly surprised it's not CA or MA, but not in this case), only requires one week per year of employment.

That said, I see the GP's argument come up quite often in any online discussion of layoffs, and it took me years to finally figure out, this topic basically comes down to a simple class issue: If someone is a moderately well-paid salaried employee, a severance offer is almost always going to beat UI by miles (and as you also pointed out, that's not a mutually exclusive choice, UI just picks up after severance ends). If someone is a low-paid nonexempt worker, by contrast, severance is usually nonexistent and employers playing games around UI claim appeals are a lot more common.

There's also other benefits to consider, most importantly health insurance. Severance offers usually allow employees to keep their group health insurance during the severance period, while COBRA is eye-wateringly expensive even for someone formerly paid well.

The highest UI check in the country is in Washington state, and only comes out to $1208/week, for a maximum of 26 weeks (barring certain exceptional circumstances). A Principal Engineer (level 65) at Microsoft averages just shy of $246k/year and this buyout is offering up to 39 weeks total.

Weekly, that's $4.7k vs $1.2k. Total, that's $184k vs 31k.

I can guarantee nobody smart enough to be an engineer at Microsoft (as much as we might make fun of their culture and products) is dumb enough to fail that one-question math exam.

Here's the problem, and why everyone resents this crap (your fellow IT folks most of all)...

Yeah, great, you're an Exchange admin and can send email "from" any random VP you want. And you have access to their recent document history so can "spice it up" by referencing actual projects we might really be assigned to. When your phishing tests are literally indistinguishable from legitimate emails, you're not "testing" anything, you're daring people to ignore legitimate work at risk of their continued employment.

If "my boss" sends me an email, which the headers show really came from his account, and asks me to take a look at a spreadsheet we worked on three days ago - You're not being clever, you're an asshole.

1) Comcast could have started moving to fiber a decade before the upstarts and qualified for the same subisidies.
2) Comcast has received 2.6B in subsidies since 1987.
3) Remind us again, how long as Biden been out of office now?

Tovarishch, your sons are dying, cold, alone, in a Ukranian ditch; just waiting for one of the many overhead drones to notice them and blow off their manhood while they bleed out. And for what? So the ex-KGB gangster in Moscow can fantasize about reuniting a mythical Historical Russian Empire that never existed and never will?

Go home to the family farm and enjoy a peaceful life. There's no glory for you in Ukraine.

I'm curious where exactly he gets that $1500 figure from. When Spectrum installed my fiber, it was half an hour's labor for a lineman, 150m of such crappy fiber I wouldn't use it as a patch cable inside my house, a 4-port 1Gbit EPON, a mid-range pre-compromised bandwidth-stealing router I threw back in the box the second the tech left (if I don't have the real admin password, it's not going on my network!). That's it. Even at massively inflated replacement prices for captive customers, that's $600 total at most (and realistically more like half that).

Pssst, Jason - You need to realize the fictional numbers you use to justify rate increases to state PUCs are just that, fiction; and your competitors are eating your lunch precisely because you don't understand the difference. One year of "subsidizing" the installation on a two year contract is still net profitable! But then, they say to never correct your enemy when they're making a mistake, and I could not be happier to have escaped Comcast's footprint years ago. You go right ahead and pretend everyone else in the market is selling at a loss. Meanwhile, they're doing just fine, I don't need to deal with Comcast, and you won't be missed.

I don't know if you're a russian bot or some deluded idiot, but it amuses me to do a breakdown of your post.

NATO turned what was originally intended to be a mostly peaceful show of force like the temporary invasion of Georgia into a war of attrition.

First of all the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Georgia involved a few hundred dead in the first two days, and another 5000+ civilians killed in the ethnic cleansing after that, all for a land-grab to seize control of territory covering half of Georgia's coastline that Putin wanted.

Secondly, the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Ukraine involved hundreds dead, ballistic and cruise missile attacks on all of Ukraine's largest cities, and Putin publicly admitting the goal of overthrowing the Ukrainian government... and that's just within the first 36 hours. Within two and a half months Russian officials began admitting the intent to permanently annex parts of Ukraine, proceeding with a constitutional amendment a few months later claiming to annex vast territories that Russian had not remotely taken control of, and which Russia is not remotely capable of capturing. Donetsk alone has a population of over a million, two million if you include the metro-area. Russia spent months and many thousand of lives to capture, and later lose, villages in the range of low tens of thousands.

Remember WWI when the lines were pretty much static for years and then suddenly it was all over?

Yes, I remember. As I recall it wasn't exactly "sudden". As I recall... Russian casualties were around five million killed, wounded, or captured, the Russian economy was collapsing, Russia was running out of food, and Russian literally lost it's own capital to civilian rebellion. A few months later the Russian government collapsed and surrendered vast territories including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Poland and Ukraine to Germany and its allies (known as the Central Powers). Right about that point the U.S. joined the war reinvigorating the Allied Powers. Germany&friends knew they couldn't win a protracted war. They attempted a quick win, and, in short, they failed. The Allied powers steadily beat them down, with the allies eventually breaking through the lines and progressively liberating territory. With the Allies steadily advancing and the war obviously lost, German forces began rebelling and Germany surrendered.

That's what's happening here. Russia has most of Donbas plus a buffer zone in some other regions that directly border Russia. Ukraine is throwing men at the front lines for Russia to kill but is running out. Territory held is largely irrelevant compared to the number of men killed and weapons destroyed.

So much to unpack there, but it's amusing how you cite "territory held is largely irrelevant" given that the tide has turned and Ukrainians are now the ones breaking through lines and liberating territory from Russian occupation. It's not much yet, but all the map trackers show the reversal. Russia is now officially loosing more territory than they gain. Russia WAS slowly gaining small bits of land, largely through sending meat waves of untrained ill equipped soldiers at Ukrainian lines until the Ukrainians ran out of ammo and had to fall back. However now 7 out of 10 Russians killed are killed by drones. The "no man's land" between the two sides is now many kilometers wide. Any Russian trying to advance gets hit by a drone. Russia has also losing on average 1 air defense system every day, and rapidly depleting. Russian supply lines are getting pummeled by drones. Russian refineries are getting pummeled by drones, with progressively worsening fuel shortages for both the military and for the increasingly rebellious population. Cheap advanced Ukrainian drones are taking out expensive crappy Russian drones, including Russian's new jet-drones. Practically every country on earth is asking Ukraine for their military drone tech, the Russians can't remotely match it. Russian's economy is also fucked, but that topic pretty needs a separate book to cover.

Interesting side notes on weapons destroyed. Russia is destroying it's aircraft almost as fast as Ukraine is, between incompetence and maintenance failures and friendly fire shooting down their own aircraft. Also the nation that is the biggest donor of tanks to Ukraine is... Russia. Ukraine captured countless Russian tanks intact because the Russian military is so abysmal incompetent and corrupt. And as I mentioned, Russian air defense units are depleting. The war is now approaching 5 years, longer than the entirety of WW1. Ukraine is a small fraction of Russia's size, and Russian is literally losing and headed towards another soviet-union-style collapse. The biggest shock to the world of this entire war is just how worthless Putin has made Russian military, through systemic corruption and systemic incompetence.

Polls show the Ukrainian population isn't interested in surrendering. They are defending their homes. It's simple, the war will end when all the soldiers go home. When Russian soldiers go back to their homes in Russia, and when Ukrainian soldiers go back to their homes in the currently occupied parts of Ukraine. Although that's not likely to happen until Putin either expires or is overthrown. Not only is he fanatical enough to drive his country to collapse in the attempt, he knows if he did end the war in failure he'd get killed or overthrown for it.

Anyway, pointless reply to a bot or a useful idiot. But maybe some random passer-by will find some bits interesting. I don't know about the rest of the world, but mainstream US news rarely mentions the Ukraine war anymore, and certainly not in any detail.

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The preliminary results that previously sent their stock soaring "only" showed a 49% reduction. 42% over a much larger population still ain't bad!

I'm honestly stumped why the market reacted as badly as it did to this news - That's still a 100% viable product, and it targets people desperate for any reduction in recurrence! Exactly 0 people will turn down 42% who would have been thrilled with 49%.

Why does using a browser depend on an "account"? And why is an already-installed application (not tied to a single service provider) going to stop working ever? I might not have a very good time with it, but I could still run a 29 year old copy of NCSA Mosaic if I really wanted to.

Then again, both of those pretty much are the answers to my other top question, "what the hell are Arc and Dia, and why have I never heard of them": Proprietary garbage whose continued use depends on the Chief Sociopath having a good quarter. Nope, and good riddance!

This story really isn't about PHP. It's about AI easily finding multiple severity-9+ externally-exploitable server-side vulnerabilities without even breaking a sweat.

Over the next few months, this same story is going to repeat for Ruby, ASP, Python, Node (or JS in general), .Net, etc. And not all of them will be so easily fixed - Or for that matter, disclosed at all prior to a working exploit in the wild.

Running a public-facing webserver is about to become the losing side of an inevitable arms race.

LPT: Peacefully protesting is not illegal in the US. Guess who this will be primarily used against?

That said, this is the same LRAD system that the military unequivocally promised would never be used inside the US or against civilians. The same LRAD system that failed spectacularly when field-tested in Iraq against so-called "insurgents". It's trivially defeated by any amount of metal (e.g. tinfoil hats really do work against it), rain or even high humidity, plastic sheets more than a few mils thick, wet cloth - Basically anything except bone-dry thin woven fabric is substantially effective at blocking it.

So of course, they'll just crank up the power and actually cook innocent bystanders, but let's be honest, we all know they'll do that even if it worked spectacularly well, because cruelty is the point, and 11 is more cruel than 10.

The time has come when a full-body faraday cage is required gear for any serious protestor - So naturally, we should fully expect wearing anti-static clothing to a protest to become a felony as soon as police realize their intended victims aren't squirming in pain enough to sate their sadism.

Respectfully, that's not what banning "tasks that require significant effort or time, or would typically be performed by a cleaner" means. Unlisted ad-hoc requirements have been prohibited all along (though admittedly, not well enforced).

AirBNB / VRBO / whatever gets a cut of every dollar. They benefit from junk fees, and couldn't care less except to the extent it costs them customers or risks incurring regulatory oversight - And basic cleaning has been a pretty standard clause right from the beginning (albeit there's a legitimate concern over hosts double-dipping).