California and Washington have constructive discharge/dismissal laws, too, FYI, and I suspect most other states do as well.

More than a dick move, unless your employment contract explicitly allows the company to force you to relocate or specifies that your work location is at a particular location, forcing you to move is a violation of your employment contract, and potentially illegal.

No one who is getting these notices should do anything without consulting two lawyers — one in their state of residence and one in Seattle, because in the event of any conflict of law, the weaker party may be favored regardless of any contract terms to the contrary, and you are by far the weaker party compared with such a large employer.

Always was. Any illusion of workers having any actual bargaining power in the employee-employer relationship is just that — an illusion. When you have a multi-billion-dollar company with 1.5 million employees, do you think they actually ever cared about losing a few? This fundamental imbalance is why most countries have strong laws to protect employees from abusive employers. Give it a little time, and Washington will pass laws in response to this, and Amazon will begin to regret their short-sightedness, having made all future layoffs harder by being too greedy during this one.

That said, in this case, the employees still have a choice not to cede even more power to the employer unnecessarily. Amazon cannot force anyone to come back to the office. This isn't a totalitarian regime where secret police can drag you out of your bed at night at the behest of a company. You have a choice whether to return or not, and if you do not, they have a choice about whether to fire you or not. It's as simple as that.

If a large enough number of people refuse their false choice (resign or move back), they might relent. And if they don't, then you're still no worse off for having made that choice. After all, resigning with no severance provides you with absolutely no benefit other than a mostly theoretical opportunity to go back to Amazon in the future. Realistically, there's no reason to believe that they'll ever hire you without you moving back, so if you're not willing to move back, then there's exactly zero reason not to just let them fire you for refusing the forced location transfer.

Furthermore, if you were hired remotely originally, then you have a strong wrongful termination claim, because forcing you into the office is at least arguably constructive dismissal. (Yes, I realize Canadian law doesn't provide precedent for Washington State, but similar principles exist here in the U.S.)

And either way, if they fire you, you will likely be eligible for unemployment, which is free money. Amazon has to pay into that fund, and if they fire a large enough number of people, their unemployment insurance costs will skyrocket, so you'll be actively punishing Amazon by refusing to leave voluntarily.

So unless you're seriously thinking about moving back and working there in person, either immediately or in the future, there is absolutely no rational reason why anyone in their right minds would resign. Let them fire you, then file for unemployment and trash them on Glassdoor. That approach does the most damage to Amazon, both financially and reputationally, and it also maximizes your income. It's a win-win. Even better, when you tell your next employer why you left your previous company, you'll immediately know whether they are decent human beings. If they reject you because of it, you'll know that you don't want to work for them.

Doesn't ANYBODY but me remember that "Napster" was actually RealNetworks? You know, the old Real.com that was the Internet's first scale, commercial streamer? Real became Rhapsody for several years. Rhapsody had no name recognition, so they bought the Napster name from it's owners... BEST BUY.

It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.

Where is the evidence that this was the case, though? When the U.S. has something like that happen, there's a formal inquiry, there's a public documentation trail showing why the actions were taken, and the consensus is that they made the right call more often than not. We're not seeing that from Israel, or if we are, it isn't being reported, and that's disconcerting, particularly given the rate of these incidents.

Hiding among civilians is not the same thing as using protected sites to run operations. One person in Hamas living in an apartment building with his/her family is not equivalent to storing vast quantities of weapons and munitions in a protected location, which is what that exception was intended to allow.

Blowing up schools with children inside is never okay. Blowing up hospitals with patients still inside is never okay. Giving them enough warning to get innocent people out is an absolute minimum standard of human decency, and failing to do that means that you're deliberately targeting civilians, hence a war crime.

The Netanyahu government can hide behind pedantic interpretations of international law all they want to, but when you look at the big picture, you don't rack up a 10:1 civilian to militant kill ratio if you're operating within the bounds of international law. There's just no way. Typical U.S. wars were less than 1:1 (ignoring any indirect deaths, which are hard to compare). And no U.S. war has ever deliberately prevented aid from getting to the innocent victims of that war. The things that the Israeli government has done are, IMO, nothing short of unconscionable. It isn't just a few incidents; it's a clear pattern of lack of concern for innocent human lives, repeated almost daily.

At this point, the U.N. commission of inquiry has concluded that Israel's actions are clear war crimes and that the intent is tantamount to genocide. There's really no defending the Israeli government's actions. They went way, WAY too far on way, WAY too many occasions to give them the benefit of the doubt. And regardless of what happens with Iran — and mind you, going after Iran's government for their proxy war against Israel is at least arguably a legitimate military action — I think it is still critical to hold the Netanyahu government accountable for war crimes committed in fighting this war, if only to serve as a deterrent to electing similar governments in the future.

Oh, I'm sure the sentiment is real. Popularity of the current government officially hovers around 50%, with a significant minority very much in favor of setting the whole government on fire (but also a not-small minority that wants to keep the status quo, and they have the guns and soldiers).

What I'm questioning is whether they're angry enough to do something about it and powerful enough to take on the entrenched power structure. After all, those sorts of mass protests in authoritarian countries tend to paint targets on the chests of the participants — in some cases, in a very literal sense (with laser scopes). And more often than not, the power vacuum gets filled with something worse, or with something so weak that it quickly topples in favor of something remarkably similar to the government that was previously in power.

But maybe this time will be different. One can only hope.

Emma Watson: Higgsley Squigglebotham. Five-nine-two Elkdale Terrace. Zero-two-zero, five-six-four-one, seven, seven, seven, seven.

Gives me the chills. :-D

On Sunday, June 25? Maybe that was a typo and it was supposed to be the 15th. Alternatively, the last time June 25 fell on a Sunday was in 2023, which tells you when the AI was released that wrote the post, and the only question remaining is which AI created the video.

I don't put a lot of faith in anything posted on X these days.

Iran buying? The bigger problem is the other way around. Iran is supplying drones, missiles, etc. that Russia is using in their war with Ukraine.

Good comment, but next time, don't forget to mention that Powell was a Trump appointee, confirmed by a Republican-majority Senate. It helps drive the point home of who is really responsible for all of this, and explains why Trump's damage to the economy didn't end when he left office.

I wouldn't say that Israel has been legitimate in their war tactics against Hamas. The civilian casualties have been incredible, and the number of times that they've blown up aid convoys and hospitals to kill a handful of Hamas people, and other similar war crimes, is staggering. The latest was just hours ago.

I suspect the only reason they seem to be trying to be legitimate in their attacks on Iran (at least so far) is because they have gotten so much blowback from their war on Gaza.

Yeah, it's a steaming pile of garbage, with 10% coming from friends and 90% being suggested s**t from random pages that I have no prior association with. At this point, I'm operating under the assumption that most of the remaining users are bots, and that they're doing this because there's zero actual organic user engagement. Eventually, the advertisers will realize that their ad dollars are being wasted, and it will be a self-correcting problem as the whole thing goes belly up.

In the Navy,
startups sail the seven seas...

You think your data is in that disk image? As If!

But seriously, I'll think about trusting it in three OS releases. I remember all the problems with sparse bundles and Time Machine, so that's not an "I'll trust it in three releases," but rather an "I'll start experimenting with it in three releases."

Ugh. That will teach me to use the mobile site. Useless because of Unicode bugs.