But what I'm curious about, and maybe some of the others here with more in-depth knowledge can illuminate, is "What stops a guy, say a CEO of an exchange, and his trusty head programmer who helped build it(who would know exploits better?), from emptying all of the wallets in the exchange and laundering it through a couple of anonymous trades and then walking away with all of the money before bitcoin further devalues due to recent events?" Surely we're not just trusting in their morals from preventing this.
Yes, that's exactly what is going on. No insurance, no bonding, no regulation. The only thing backing any of these exchanges is the reputation of the exchange. There probably is an opportunity for an exchange that's actually backed by some sort of "real world" protection, and the climate seems to changing (especially in the last two weeks) such that people would pay a premium to park their Bitcoins there.
Ok, I don't understand how bitcoin works, but ultimately they're just encryped hash files on a disk, right? So unless the other person spends them before you do and you have a backup, how can they be stolen?
Someone please explain...
Loosely speaking, a Bitcoin is a secret number. To spend a Bitcoin, you send that number to someone else and the transaction is recorded by the Bitcoin network. The network keeps track of who owns each coin, which means others can verify the ownership of a coin by consulting the network.
The exchanges work by you "spending" your Bitcoin to them, so now in the network's eyes, the exchange is the owner of that coin. In return, the exchange keeps a record that you have a certain number of Bitcoins in your account. The idea being that in the future you can instruct the exchange to send coins back to you, to other people, or to deduct an amount of coin and send you the cash instead.
It's just like a bank; you hand a teller $20, the bank adds $20 to your balance, and they keep the $20 bill.
Where these exchanges differ from a bank is in their lack of accounting ability, apparently.
Meh. They know what they're signing up for. I would hope that all those military science classes taught by the ROTC that they took while working towards their degree would clue them in, as well. I declined the military route as neither the commitment nor the chance of shooting people or being shot at appealed to me.
I have a cousin who graduated from commercial pilot school with $70k+ of debt just after 9/11. After six months of job searching when airlines just weren't interested in hiring, he joined the Army and began flying blackhawks. Ended up a few years later teaching in their helicopter school.
Perfect solution? Of course not; he's done 4 tours overseas and been moved around to 3 different bases States-side since then. But having a mortgage-sized student loan 12 years later is not one of his problems.
A lot of Monday morning quarterbacks on this one. Yes, they might have been able to cut lots of corners and gotten Atlantis up, at a significant risk to the Atlantis crew. What then? Do we have the Columbia crew spacewalk over to Atlantis with instructions for the last astronaut to turn off the lights? Aim Columbia at the ocean and hope for the best?
If they had had such a plan in place and executed it, and some other loss of life had happened because of the increased risk, everyone likely would have been up in arms about how NASA had cavalierly risked additional crew when they could have just reentered Columbia.
Incorrect. A crooked bank teller would be put into prison and bank would have to compensate you. In the case of a crooked bank president the _government_ (or state-run bank insurance organization like FDIC) would have to compensate you.
The classic banking system evolved for a LONG time to minimize the effects of bank failures and bad bank employees. Besides, it's almost impossible to actually _steal_ money from a bank. Sure, you can rob a bank and maybe get a couple hundred thousands in cash. But stealing any non-trivial sum is impossible, because accounts are not kept in anonymous cash.
As many people have pointed out, regulated banks in the US have the FDIC behind them to give depositors a warm cozy feeling when they drop off their money. In exchange for that backing, the banks agree to abide by a set of rules to safeguard deposits and pay into the fund that is used to reimburse depositors of failed banks. MtGox (and every other Bitcoin exchange) has none of that. Their biggest asset is their reputation, which will never recover from this even if they could scrounge up the money to make whole all of their accounts.
I suppose a better example would be asking your frat brother to hold onto your cash for you. Maybe he could keep it in his glove box, if we really need a car analogy.
I don't understand Bitcoins in general, but I *really* don't understand the process where they could be stolen. Could someone please explain it? Car analogies OK.
Just about any scenario where money is held as cash or a deposit in a bank account could apply equally to Bitcoin. You give a stack of $100 bills to a bank, they give you a slip of paper showing they have your money and will give it back when you ask. If the bank president or a crooked teller then puts everyone's stacks of $100 bills in a suitcase and disappears, your slip of paper isn't worth much.
In the case of the Pirateat40, it was a classic Ponzi scheme. The fact that it was done with Bitcoins instead of pieces of paper with pictures of dead Presidents and statesmen on them doesn't change much.
Is there a possibility that a change is possible within your current company? It sounds like you're not unhappy with your employer, just your position. If they are a great company to work for, maybe you should bring up your concerns with them about making a move within the company to stretch your wings a little.
The best way to make that happen might be with the new job offer in hand. Ask for a meeting with your manager, and stress that you're not unhappy with the company, but that this opportunity came your way and it gave you a chance to reflect on what you want out of your career. Lay out what you would like to see change in clear, concise language. If you can't put it into words, that tells you that you need to think it through some more to make it clear to yourself exactly what you are after.
If they can't meet your needs where you're at, then it's time to give notice and take the offer. If they get all offended and fire you, then it probably was time to go anyway and you can let the new company know that you want to get started immediately.
Just remember: the grass on the other side of the fence might really be greener, but it could just be because of the extra fertilizer.
Do they still have the ridiculously cheap Volt leases? Last year there were times when you could drive a Volt for $199/month with something like $3k down. For a $45k car, that was crazy cheap. The speculation was that GM was subsidizing the leases to get them out of the factory and on the road, so they could point to the numbers and show that the car was a success.
Doing a quick Google search shows there are places offering $249/month 36 month leases today. Whether or not there are cars to actually be had at that price may be a different story...
What people don't realize about the Leaf is that......you just go about your day. Every time you get home, magic elves start filling your gas tank. Sure these elves steal about 60 or 70 cents a day from you in electricity, but every day these elves charge your car while you sleep. When you drive to the movies, you park up front, in the reserved electric car spot with the free charger they provide at nearly every mall. About 50% of your grocery stores (in my city), you just park and top off your Leaf while you shop -- all while parking near the front row again. You just go about your day.
The 85 miles you can go in a day easily -- easily -- can become 100+ as you just go about your day, doing what you normally do.
After a while, the anxiety subsides.
Every once in a while, you have a plan a trip. The overwhelming majority of the time......not so much.
I don't think your idea of "just going about your day" would work in my area. Looking for a parking spot where I can pull an extension cord out of the trunk and plug in with every stop I make seems like a major PITA, and there just don't seem to be that many places to plug in around here. Granted, I may just not be noticing them since I'm not looking for them.
I love the idea of an EV and really wanted to like the Prius that I test drove last year, planning to do a plugin conversion. My wife didn't like the interior of the car, and I was concerned about voiding the warranty with the conversion, so we continue to look for a solution that makes sense for us.
There are even laws now to codify such arrangements. If a Southeastern state lures a manufacturing plant from say, Washington or Oregon, one of the ways they do it is to agree to allow the company to keep any state income taxes that are withheld from employees wages. The taxes are still taken out of each paycheck, but the money never goes beyond the company's coffers.
Corporations are seeking out this kind of deal, and states, in a rush to the bottom, are giving in so they can show how they're "bringing jobs" to their area.
I've heard of states (or counties or cities) giving breaks to corporations for income, property, or other taxes, but I've never heard of an arrangement where the company is allowed to keep any withholdings from employee's payrolls as you claim... do you have a concrete example you could share?
This is actually a really good idea. However, it does need some limits, particularly with regard to tuition prices. This proposal will give universities to raise tuition prices like mad. We need to place some serious restrictions on those.
No, this is not a good idea, this is an idea that seems good and laudable on the surface but starts to fall apart under examination. You've already identified one huge problem: "free money" is a large part of the tuition problem now; schools are not motivated to keep costs in check, since a potential student can just get a loan to cover the costs. Distancing the cost further from the individual student to a pool of all former students is even worse.
From the summary:
'As pressure mounts for more students from all backgrounds to attend college, it will become increasingly difficult to try to stem the rapid tuition inflation under a loan system,' concludes Freedman. 'Our current student loan system has made college more expensive, turned higher education into an individual, rather than a communal, good, and generated serious negative economic and social risks.'"
Higher education has always been primarily an individual good. Sure, society benefits from education too, but the real reason to get a degree is to get a job. If the goal is to get more people through a college or vocational program, this will have the exact opposite effect. I can't think of a worse way to encourage people to become educated "for the public good" than to tell them as soon as they're educated "society" will be taxing them extra.
How does this lead to two million dollars in expenses? Is he running his own insurance company for the employees?
It's possible. Self-insurance is a thing a lot of companies do. Granted that typically doesn't happen in health insurance, but it is possible.
It's slightly more likely that their insurer jacked up it's rates due to increased costs, or jacked up rates for no reason and claimed it was due to those costs.
What's most likely is that somebody told him about the "distressed babies," and he used that as a rationalization for being a dick on the 401ks.
My previous employer was self-insured, a fact that they liked to remind us of each year when premiums went up. But even self-insured companies can purchase reinsurance to back catastrophic losses.
With all due respect, "Large successful companies" don't do layoffs. Large struggling companies do.
And they need to be able to do it. If companies are told they can never let excess employees go, they will be all the more hesitant to hire when they need extra labor.
eInk could be updated every minute for a (wait for it) 60x power savings over updating every second, but even running an LCD all the time is possible with only solar, there are watches that do that right now.
As this one hasn't panned out as you had hoped, you might want to consider evaluating how you approach your next contract. Rather than cross your fingers and sign up for 6 months, you might suggest to the company that they bring you on for 12-40 hours of evaluation work. Offer a reduced rate or even to do that work for free, if needed. At the end of that contract, you will provide them with your professional opinion of what it would take to complete the work they are expecting for the full contract. Break it down into schedule and price, present it to them so they can see what you're offering and how you'll be worth it. Price that contract accordingly. If you want the work, emphasize how you are now the most familiar candidtate with the work to be completed. If you don't want the work, finish your presentation explaining how you feel that as a professional, you can't in good conscience accept their contract because they would be throwing good money after bad, but would be more than happy to help them find someone who can.
This approach will tell you several things:
The health of the code you're about to become responsible for.
If the company balks at the idea of paying for you to evaluate their code, let that be a warning as to how willing they'll be to pay for "real" work. If their management can't get this straight, expect that they will also jerk you around with their specifications and last-minute changes.
If their code is an unholy mess, you can decline to bid for the followup work, or at least bid at a rate that makes it worth it to you to slog through it. Declining the work in a professional way, like "I think you will be better served by finding someone else to complete the work; can I refer someone to you?" is miles above taking on the work and then quitting or doing a piss-poor job of it.,
Don't worry about them never hiring you again. If the relationship is going to sour, it's better for both parties to know that up front rather than invest 6 months of time into it.
Firing salesmen who earn too much is a common failure mode for small businesses.
A wise friend once told me, "You can never overpay a salesman on commission."
Apparently it's very easy to look at a high-performing salesman and think they're overpaid, forgetting the large buckets of money they brought in to lead to their commissions...
If this guy is so good, why would Oracle try to low-ball him like this?
You have obviously never worked for a large company. Oracle did not try to low-ball him. Some shitty middle-management idiot backed by an HR-chick who likes to stay friends with those in power low-balled him.
If you read the article, you'll see that the Indian employee's manager tried to negotiate him a decent salary, on behalf of Oracle. It was that manager's director who decided otherwise. Had that manager gone one step higher, it might as well have turned out otherwise. Keep in mind that there are many layers of management in a company like Oracle, and that even a title like "VP" will most like be 5 or 6 steps away from the board-room.
I understand that "Oracle" didn't try to low-ball him, it was someone with that particular mental defect who thinks that winning a negotiation means they are powerful. If you're a manager with fiscal authority (in a company of any size) and you give up a talented employee for $10k, you are a doofus. Doing it while discriminating is strike #2, and getting caught is #3.
The guy is considered so good, they want to move him to the other side of the world. That generally means he's at least as good as, if not better than, the top performers of his US counterparts. Otherwise a company would not normally bother with the efforts of moving an employee.
The last time I moved for a new position, my new employer spent over $20k just in my relocation expenses, and I only moved about 300 miles.
If this guy is so good, why would Oracle try to low-ball him like this? His boss wants to offer him a position with a $60,000 salary that would require him to relocate half-way around the world, and his bosses come back wanting to low-ball the guy by $10k? Assuming the employee has a spouse and maybe a kid or two, they would spend more than this on plane tickets and immigration paperwork, for crying out loud! Oracle, are you really that stupid? This is penny ante thinking!
I've never met anyone with side effects from the polio vaccine that I'm aware of, but I have met people who had polio as children before vaccination became widespread.
Not to downplay the problems that you've had from the vaccine, but do you really think the world on whole was better off before the vaccine? Mortality rates are very high, and those that survive are affected for life.
As a father of 3 (soon to be 5), I'll roll the dice with the vaccine.
Slashdot Mirror
But what I'm curious about, and maybe some of the others here with more in-depth knowledge can illuminate, is "What stops a guy, say a CEO of an exchange, and his trusty head programmer who helped build it(who would know exploits better?), from emptying all of the wallets in the exchange and laundering it through a couple of anonymous trades and then walking away with all of the money before bitcoin further devalues due to recent events?" Surely we're not just trusting in their morals from preventing this.
Yes, that's exactly what is going on. No insurance, no bonding, no regulation. The only thing backing any of these exchanges is the reputation of the exchange. There probably is an opportunity for an exchange that's actually backed by some sort of "real world" protection, and the climate seems to changing (especially in the last two weeks) such that people would pay a premium to park their Bitcoins there.
Ok, I don't understand how bitcoin works, but ultimately they're just encryped hash files on a disk, right? So unless the other person spends them before you do and you have a backup, how can they be stolen?
Someone please explain...
Loosely speaking, a Bitcoin is a secret number. To spend a Bitcoin, you send that number to someone else and the transaction is recorded by the Bitcoin network. The network keeps track of who owns each coin, which means others can verify the ownership of a coin by consulting the network.
The exchanges work by you "spending" your Bitcoin to them, so now in the network's eyes, the exchange is the owner of that coin. In return, the exchange keeps a record that you have a certain number of Bitcoins in your account. The idea being that in the future you can instruct the exchange to send coins back to you, to other people, or to deduct an amount of coin and send you the cash instead.
It's just like a bank; you hand a teller $20, the bank adds $20 to your balance, and they keep the $20 bill.
Where these exchanges differ from a bank is in their lack of accounting ability, apparently.
Meh. They know what they're signing up for. I would hope that all those military science classes taught by the ROTC that they took while working towards their degree would clue them in, as well.
I declined the military route as neither the commitment nor the chance of shooting people or being shot at appealed to me.
I have a cousin who graduated from commercial pilot school with $70k+ of debt just after 9/11. After six months of job searching when airlines just weren't interested in hiring, he joined the Army and began flying blackhawks. Ended up a few years later teaching in their helicopter school.
Perfect solution? Of course not; he's done 4 tours overseas and been moved around to 3 different bases States-side since then. But having a mortgage-sized student loan 12 years later is not one of his problems.
You call that debt free?!
Some would call it "guaranteed 3-year employment after college".
A lot of Monday morning quarterbacks on this one. Yes, they might have been able to cut lots of corners and gotten Atlantis up, at a significant risk to the Atlantis crew. What then? Do we have the Columbia crew spacewalk over to Atlantis with instructions for the last astronaut to turn off the lights? Aim Columbia at the ocean and hope for the best?
If they had had such a plan in place and executed it, and some other loss of life had happened because of the increased risk, everyone likely would have been up in arms about how NASA had cavalierly risked additional crew when they could have just reentered Columbia.
You've got questions?
We've got cell phones!
Incorrect. A crooked bank teller would be put into prison and bank would have to compensate you. In the case of a crooked bank president the _government_ (or state-run bank insurance organization like FDIC) would have to compensate you.
The classic banking system evolved for a LONG time to minimize the effects of bank failures and bad bank employees. Besides, it's almost impossible to actually _steal_ money from a bank. Sure, you can rob a bank and maybe get a couple hundred thousands in cash. But stealing any non-trivial sum is impossible, because accounts are not kept in anonymous cash.
As many people have pointed out, regulated banks in the US have the FDIC behind them to give depositors a warm cozy feeling when they drop off their money. In exchange for that backing, the banks agree to abide by a set of rules to safeguard deposits and pay into the fund that is used to reimburse depositors of failed banks. MtGox (and every other Bitcoin exchange) has none of that. Their biggest asset is their reputation, which will never recover from this even if they could scrounge up the money to make whole all of their accounts.
I suppose a better example would be asking your frat brother to hold onto your cash for you. Maybe he could keep it in his glove box, if we really need a car analogy.
I don't understand Bitcoins in general, but I *really* don't understand the process where they could be stolen. Could someone please explain it? Car analogies OK.
Just about any scenario where money is held as cash or a deposit in a bank account could apply equally to Bitcoin. You give a stack of $100 bills to a bank, they give you a slip of paper showing they have your money and will give it back when you ask. If the bank president or a crooked teller then puts everyone's stacks of $100 bills in a suitcase and disappears, your slip of paper isn't worth much.
In the case of the Pirateat40, it was a classic Ponzi scheme. The fact that it was done with Bitcoins instead of pieces of paper with pictures of dead Presidents and statesmen on them doesn't change much.
Is there a possibility that a change is possible within your current company? It sounds like you're not unhappy with your employer, just your position. If they are a great company to work for, maybe you should bring up your concerns with them about making a move within the company to stretch your wings a little.
The best way to make that happen might be with the new job offer in hand. Ask for a meeting with your manager, and stress that you're not unhappy with the company, but that this opportunity came your way and it gave you a chance to reflect on what you want out of your career. Lay out what you would like to see change in clear, concise language. If you can't put it into words, that tells you that you need to think it through some more to make it clear to yourself exactly what you are after.
If they can't meet your needs where you're at, then it's time to give notice and take the offer. If they get all offended and fire you, then it probably was time to go anyway and you can let the new company know that you want to get started immediately.
Just remember: the grass on the other side of the fence might really be greener, but it could just be because of the extra fertilizer.
Do they still have the ridiculously cheap Volt leases? Last year there were times when you could drive a Volt for $199/month with something like $3k down. For a $45k car, that was crazy cheap. The speculation was that GM was subsidizing the leases to get them out of the factory and on the road, so they could point to the numbers and show that the car was a success.
Doing a quick Google search shows there are places offering $249/month 36 month leases today. Whether or not there are cars to actually be had at that price may be a different story...
What people don't realize about the Leaf is that... ...you just go about your day. Every time you get home, magic elves start filling your gas tank. Sure these elves steal about 60 or 70 cents a day from you in electricity, but every day these elves charge your car while you sleep. When you drive to the movies, you park up front, in the reserved electric car spot with the free charger they provide at nearly every mall. About 50% of your grocery stores (in my city), you just park and top off your Leaf while you shop -- all while parking near the front row again. You just go about your day.
The 85 miles you can go in a day easily -- easily -- can become 100+ as you just go about your day, doing what you normally do.
After a while, the anxiety subsides.
Every once in a while, you have a plan a trip. The overwhelming majority of the time... ...not so much.
I don't think your idea of "just going about your day" would work in my area. Looking for a parking spot where I can pull an extension cord out of the trunk and plug in with every stop I make seems like a major PITA, and there just don't seem to be that many places to plug in around here. Granted, I may just not be noticing them since I'm not looking for them.
I love the idea of an EV and really wanted to like the Prius that I test drove last year, planning to do a plugin conversion. My wife didn't like the interior of the car, and I was concerned about voiding the warranty with the conversion, so we continue to look for a solution that makes sense for us.
Wow. Just wow.
There are even laws now to codify such arrangements. If a Southeastern state lures a manufacturing plant from say, Washington or Oregon, one of the ways they do it is to agree to allow the company to keep any state income taxes that are withheld from employees wages. The taxes are still taken out of each paycheck, but the money never goes beyond the company's coffers.
Corporations are seeking out this kind of deal, and states, in a rush to the bottom, are giving in so they can show how they're "bringing jobs" to their area.
I've heard of states (or counties or cities) giving breaks to corporations for income, property, or other taxes, but I've never heard of an arrangement where the company is allowed to keep any withholdings from employee's payrolls as you claim... do you have a concrete example you could share?
This is actually a really good idea. However, it does need some limits, particularly with regard to tuition prices. This proposal will give universities to raise tuition prices like mad. We need to place some serious restrictions on those.
No, this is not a good idea, this is an idea that seems good and laudable on the surface but starts to fall apart under examination. You've already identified one huge problem: "free money" is a large part of the tuition problem now; schools are not motivated to keep costs in check, since a potential student can just get a loan to cover the costs. Distancing the cost further from the individual student to a pool of all former students is even worse.
From the summary:
'As pressure mounts for more students from all backgrounds to attend college, it will become increasingly difficult to try to stem the rapid tuition inflation under a loan system,' concludes Freedman. 'Our current student loan system has made college more expensive, turned higher education into an individual, rather than a communal, good, and generated serious negative economic and social risks.'"
Higher education has always been primarily an individual good. Sure, society benefits from education too, but the real reason to get a degree is to get a job.
If the goal is to get more people through a college or vocational program, this will have the exact opposite effect. I can't think of a worse way to encourage people to become educated "for the public good" than to tell them as soon as they're educated "society" will be taxing them extra.
How does this lead to two million dollars in expenses? Is he running his own insurance company for the employees?
It's possible. Self-insurance is a thing a lot of companies do. Granted that typically doesn't happen in health insurance, but it is possible.
It's slightly more likely that their insurer jacked up it's rates due to increased costs, or jacked up rates for no reason and claimed it was due to those costs.
What's most likely is that somebody told him about the "distressed babies," and he used that as a rationalization for being a dick on the 401ks.
My previous employer was self-insured, a fact that they liked to remind us of each year when premiums went up. But even self-insured companies can purchase reinsurance to back catastrophic losses.
I think you need to research how government-mandated insurance works... The government doesn't make a dime off the insurance companies.
"The government" may not make any money off of insurance companies, but lawmakers sure do.
With all due respect, "Large successful companies" don't do layoffs. Large struggling companies do.
And they need to be able to do it. If companies are told they can never let excess employees go, they will be all the more hesitant to hire when they need extra labor.
I have dreams about past jobs where I wasn't 100% sure if leaving was the right decision. Coulda/woulda/shoulda haunts my dreams.
eInk could be updated every minute for a (wait for it) 60x power savings over updating every second, but even running an LCD all the time is possible with only solar, there are watches that do that right now.
As this one hasn't panned out as you had hoped, you might want to consider evaluating how you approach your next contract. Rather than cross your fingers and sign up for 6 months, you might suggest to the company that they bring you on for 12-40 hours of evaluation work. Offer a reduced rate or even to do that work for free, if needed. At the end of that contract, you will provide them with your professional opinion of what it would take to complete the work they are expecting for the full contract. Break it down into schedule and price, present it to them so they can see what you're offering and how you'll be worth it. Price that contract accordingly. If you want the work, emphasize how you are now the most familiar candidtate with the work to be completed. If you don't want the work, finish your presentation explaining how you feel that as a professional, you can't in good conscience accept their contract because they would be throwing good money after bad, but would be more than happy to help them find someone who can.
This approach will tell you several things:
Don't worry about them never hiring you again. If the relationship is going to sour, it's better for both parties to know that up front rather than invest 6 months of time into it.
Fizzbuzz for the win. Depressing, but it is an accurate test.
Firing salesmen who earn too much is a common failure mode for small businesses.
A wise friend once told me, "You can never overpay a salesman on commission."
Apparently it's very easy to look at a high-performing salesman and think they're overpaid, forgetting the large buckets of money they brought in to lead to their commissions...
If this guy is so good, why would Oracle try to low-ball him like this?
You have obviously never worked for a large company. Oracle did not try to low-ball him. Some shitty middle-management idiot backed by an HR-chick who likes to stay friends with those in power low-balled him.
If you read the article, you'll see that the Indian employee's manager tried to negotiate him a decent salary, on behalf of Oracle. It was that manager's director who decided otherwise. Had that manager gone one step higher, it might as well have turned out otherwise. Keep in mind that there are many layers of management in a company like Oracle, and that even a title like "VP" will most like be 5 or 6 steps away from the board-room.
I understand that "Oracle" didn't try to low-ball him, it was someone with that particular mental defect who thinks that winning a negotiation means they are powerful. If you're a manager with fiscal authority (in a company of any size) and you give up a talented employee for $10k, you are a doofus. Doing it while discriminating is strike #2, and getting caught is #3.
The guy is considered so good, they want to move him to the other side of the world. That generally means he's at least as good as, if not better than, the top performers of his US counterparts. Otherwise a company would not normally bother with the efforts of moving an employee.
The last time I moved for a new position, my new employer spent over $20k just in my relocation expenses, and I only moved about 300 miles.
If this guy is so good, why would Oracle try to low-ball him like this? His boss wants to offer him a position with a $60,000 salary that would require him to relocate half-way around the world, and his bosses come back wanting to low-ball the guy by $10k? Assuming the employee has a spouse and maybe a kid or two, they would spend more than this on plane tickets and immigration paperwork, for crying out loud! Oracle, are you really that stupid? This is penny ante thinking!
I've never met anyone with side effects from the polio vaccine that I'm aware of, but I have met people who had polio as children before vaccination became widespread.
Not to downplay the problems that you've had from the vaccine, but do you really think the world on whole was better off before the vaccine? Mortality rates are very high, and those that survive are affected for life.
As a father of 3 (soon to be 5), I'll roll the dice with the vaccine.