Keeping records like that is a trade-off. You can go back and construct them in case there is a problem or dispute, or you can keep them from the start, which makes it easier to misuse them.
If Nazis go around asking who is Jewish, you can be pretty sure it's not to make sure Jews are treated decently; if MLK were to ask who was white, it assuredly would not be to judge people on that basis. Most people and organizations are not going to be so clear in their motivations.
2000 food calories per day is just under 100 W. A computer with a high-end GPU under load is going to significantly exceed that. So, no, a person is not going to generate more heat than the OP's gaming system.
It's neither legal not ethical for a company to"offer" services on an opt-out basis, but why does this rant focus on Wells Fargo (scummy though they also be)?
American Home Shield is not owned it operated by WF. It is owned by the same company that owns Terminix, Merry Maids, and some other brands. When you buy a house, the transfer is a public record in most places, and you absolutely will get a lot of junk offers from companies who have no relationship to any of the ones you used.
VoIP required that your phone was turned on, your app was running, and regularly pulled requests.
Got a citation for that? SIP requires a UDP and/or TCP socket to be up and listening. It does not require that any IP data be transferred between calls. It *does* require the phone to communicate with the mobile network frequently enough for incoming calls or data sessions to be routed to the right place, but that is true for voice calls and push notifications as well...
The new feature allows your phone to be asleep, use no energy, and wake up immediately
... so this part is also wrong, unless Apple has implemented their OS in an incompetent way, in which case you should clarify that only iPhones suffer from significantly higher battery use when an app keeps open a listening socket.
No, I just read your sentence fragment as meaning "[That's not so] in the UK", because my comment was rather narrowly about the UK vs US tax treatments of this kind of compensation.
So the BBC's business editor was wrong when he wrote "HMRC rules allow employees to receive £3,600 worth of shares from their employer tax free every year"?
I said "given", not granted. Until your option or stock vests, ask you own is a piece of paper.
And RSUs are uncommon in general. They are recently popular in Sili Valley, but otherwise about as common as defined-benefit pensions in private companies.
Secondly, if the stock goes up, you get taxed _again_ when you sell it. The company isn't paying shit in taxes for this, mind you, they're passing it on to the employe[e...]
That's how capital gains work. Say I pay 1000 GBP for stock, or someone buys it for me at that price. That becomes my "cost basis" for the stock. The market value of that stock increases to 2000 GBP. I have 1000 GBP of capital gains, and if I sell at that price, I pay taxes on that gain. The company doesn't owe taxes on that gain because they sold the share before those gains accrued, so nothing is being "passed on" to the employee.
Interesting. In the US, that would count as ordinary income in the year the stock was given; the tax effects make it an uncommon practice. We don't have anything like the £3,600 exclusion that is mentioned in the article. US companies also (as far as I know) can't restrict how long the employee works for the company before selling an actual share that has already been granted. Perhaps the Amazon UK write-off is related to how they structure that incentive scheme.
I don't know how UK law works, or whether Amazon UK did something like this (assuming it is possible), but something like this is common in US tech companies. It's called a stock option grant.
A stock option is a contract that one party fulfills by selling some number of shares of the stock to the other other party for a given price. For a typical tech employee, this takes the form of an incentive stock option, where the employee usually has to stay employed (perhaps full-time) in good status (rather than being on administrative leave, or in prison, or what not) for some period of time. For example, the grant might say that the employee can buy 25% of the options after one year, another 25% after two years, and so forth.
The price the employee has to pay (say, $X/share) is called the strike price. If this is different than the market value of the stock, it counts as compensation when the option is granted. Because this isn't very convenient for employees, usually the strike price is the market value at the time of the grant.
When the employee exercises the option to buy the share(s), the difference between the market value at the time of exercise and the strike price is deductible by the employer as a compensation cost. If the market price was $3X, and the strike price was $X, then the employer has essentially given up $2X to the employee. (The employee has to pay taxes on proceeds when they sell the stock to someone else, and the usual rules for capital gains apply: If they held the share for less than a year, it basically counts as ordinary income; if they held it for longer, it counts as a long-term capital gain or loss.)
Again, that's how it would work in the US, but I don't know that this is exactly how Amazon UK did it.
My point, which was apparently too subtle for you, was that those harms come from how the unmasked data is used, not from the mere unmasking, and much less from the disclosure of weaknesses in the masking procedures.
What are you saying? That the only way you (Europeans) are protected from robocalls is that it has been made illegal to talk about weaknesses in data anonymization?
Robocalls are a problem in the US mostly because of the First Amendment, not because it's legal to talk about how to de-anonymize a data set.
That is, frankly, pants-on-head stupid. This law isn't about lists of people in witness protection programs, and it isn't limited to protecting their status as witnesses.
Your analogy fails badly. Where is the harm when someone is de-anonymized? Other laws already prohibit publication of private information, defamation, and other bad uses of the unmasked data. It doesn't seem to me that de-anonymization itself causes any harm, whereas the harm is obvious for murder, rape, theft, and so forth.
Use of racial slurs is one of the classic things that can create a hostile work environment. There is nothing in this memo remotely like that. It addresses policy questions -- how to best understand the sex-related differences in tech employment, and how to effectively encourage women to be engaged in tech jobs -- that clearly resonate across the country and with strong political correlation.
Lighten up, Francis. Your rage over your incompetence is making you both prolix and sloppy. And get off your high horse: you look incredibly stupid when you claim that a web page that you misread proves that I'm wrong.
There is plenty of precedent over what constitutes a hostile work environment, and circulating this memo does not even approach that threshold. If you read a little more of the page that you just cited -- the one about the elements of liability -- you would notice that the memo satisfies neither elements #1 nor #3, even if you're too daft to realize it also doesn't satisfy #5 and too ignorant to realize it doesn't satisfy #4 (because "abusive" and "hostile" both have fairly specific meanings in this context, and "somebody wrote a gentle, impersonal memo that hurt my feelings" simply does not qualify), and that the plaintiff must establish that all of those elements were present. Your feels, hurt though they may be, do not affect that conclusion.
Firing someone for their well-intentioned and fairly mild analysis of illegal HR practices (wherein they also made specific constructive suggestions about how to fix those practices) is morally wrong even where it's not per se illegal. Firing someone because they pointed out that the employer is engaged in illegal discrimination is itself illegal. The nationwide response shows that the topic and content is strongly political, which tends to make Google's punishment of Dalmore more suspect under California's protected-category law.
In a very practical sense, Snowball Earth is a harder scenario to escape than Greenhouse Earth. Both have high albedos (due to snow and clouds, respectively), which helps reduce temperature. It's pretty impractical to replace much of the energy contribution of solar loading by burning terrestrial sources of energy: sunlight is too bright, and the Earth has too big a cross-section.
We have great models for the physics and chemistry in human bodies, so why can't we produce an artificial human brain? What makes global climate so much more tractable to simulation than a single human body?
Slashdot Mirror
RoundUp is a herbicide. Neonics are pesticides, and are not among the active ingredients in RoundUp.
Soylent Orange.
Keeping records like that is a trade-off. You can go back and construct them in case there is a problem or dispute, or you can keep them from the start, which makes it easier to misuse them.
If Nazis go around asking who is Jewish, you can be pretty sure it's not to make sure Jews are treated decently; if MLK were to ask who was white, it assuredly would not be to judge people on that basis. Most people and organizations are not going to be so clear in their motivations.
Amazingly few corny pickup lines, I assume.
2000 food calories per day is just under 100 W. A computer with a high-end GPU under load is going to significantly exceed that. So, no, a person is not going to generate more heat than the OP's gaming system.
I generally avoid reading that shitty blog. They are factually unreliable, horribly biased, and enforce ideological orthodoxy in their comments.
Not all junk offers are illegal. I already said that if the company did what the summary described, it was illegal. What more do you want?
It's neither legal not ethical for a company to"offer" services on an opt-out basis, but why does this rant focus on Wells Fargo (scummy though they also be)?
American Home Shield is not owned it operated by WF. It is owned by the same company that owns Terminix, Merry Maids, and some other brands. When you buy a house, the transfer is a public record in most places, and you absolutely will get a lot of junk offers from companies who have no relationship to any of the ones you used.
Got a citation for that? SIP requires a UDP and/or TCP socket to be up and listening. It does not require that any IP data be transferred between calls. It *does* require the phone to communicate with the mobile network frequently enough for incoming calls or data sessions to be routed to the right place, but that is true for voice calls and push notifications as well...
No, I just read your sentence fragment as meaning "[That's not so] in the UK", because my comment was rather narrowly about the UK vs US tax treatments of this kind of compensation.
So the BBC's business editor was wrong when he wrote "HMRC rules allow employees to receive £3,600 worth of shares from their employer tax free every year"?
I said "given", not granted. Until your option or stock vests, ask you own is a piece of paper.
And RSUs are uncommon in general. They are recently popular in Sili Valley, but otherwise about as common as defined-benefit pensions in private companies.
That's how capital gains work. Say I pay 1000 GBP for stock, or someone buys it for me at that price. That becomes my "cost basis" for the stock. The market value of that stock increases to 2000 GBP. I have 1000 GBP of capital gains, and if I sell at that price, I pay taxes on that gain. The company doesn't owe taxes on that gain because they sold the share before those gains accrued, so nothing is being "passed on" to the employee.
Interesting. In the US, that would count as ordinary income in the year the stock was given; the tax effects make it an uncommon practice. We don't have anything like the £3,600 exclusion that is mentioned in the article. US companies also (as far as I know) can't restrict how long the employee works for the company before selling an actual share that has already been granted. Perhaps the Amazon UK write-off is related to how they structure that incentive scheme.
I don't know how UK law works, or whether Amazon UK did something like this (assuming it is possible), but something like this is common in US tech companies. It's called a stock option grant.
A stock option is a contract that one party fulfills by selling some number of shares of the stock to the other other party for a given price. For a typical tech employee, this takes the form of an incentive stock option, where the employee usually has to stay employed (perhaps full-time) in good status (rather than being on administrative leave, or in prison, or what not) for some period of time. For example, the grant might say that the employee can buy 25% of the options after one year, another 25% after two years, and so forth.
The price the employee has to pay (say, $X/share) is called the strike price. If this is different than the market value of the stock, it counts as compensation when the option is granted. Because this isn't very convenient for employees, usually the strike price is the market value at the time of the grant.
When the employee exercises the option to buy the share(s), the difference between the market value at the time of exercise and the strike price is deductible by the employer as a compensation cost. If the market price was $3X, and the strike price was $X, then the employer has essentially given up $2X to the employee. (The employee has to pay taxes on proceeds when they sell the stock to someone else, and the usual rules for capital gains apply: If they held the share for less than a year, it basically counts as ordinary income; if they held it for longer, it counts as a long-term capital gain or loss.)
Again, that's how it would work in the US, but I don't know that this is exactly how Amazon UK did it.
Which personal right are you referring to? This is data that is already in the hands of someone else. They've just somehow masked bits of it.
My point, which was apparently too subtle for you, was that those harms come from how the unmasked data is used, not from the mere unmasking, and much less from the disclosure of weaknesses in the masking procedures.
What are you saying? That the only way you (Europeans) are protected from robocalls is that it has been made illegal to talk about weaknesses in data anonymization?
Robocalls are a problem in the US mostly because of the First Amendment, not because it's legal to talk about how to de-anonymize a data set.
That is, frankly, pants-on-head stupid. This law isn't about lists of people in witness protection programs, and it isn't limited to protecting their status as witnesses.
When the government exempts itself from the laws that it applies to other people, that's a pretty strong clue that those laws are unjust.
Your analogy fails badly. Where is the harm when someone is de-anonymized? Other laws already prohibit publication of private information, defamation, and other bad uses of the unmasked data. It doesn't seem to me that de-anonymization itself causes any harm, whereas the harm is obvious for murder, rape, theft, and so forth.
Use of racial slurs is one of the classic things that can create a hostile work environment. There is nothing in this memo remotely like that. It addresses policy questions -- how to best understand the sex-related differences in tech employment, and how to effectively encourage women to be engaged in tech jobs -- that clearly resonate across the country and with strong political correlation.
Lighten up, Francis. Your rage over your incompetence is making you both prolix and sloppy. And get off your high horse: you look incredibly stupid when you claim that a web page that you misread proves that I'm wrong.
There is plenty of precedent over what constitutes a hostile work environment, and circulating this memo does not even approach that threshold. If you read a little more of the page that you just cited -- the one about the elements of liability -- you would notice that the memo satisfies neither elements #1 nor #3, even if you're too daft to realize it also doesn't satisfy #5 and too ignorant to realize it doesn't satisfy #4 (because "abusive" and "hostile" both have fairly specific meanings in this context, and "somebody wrote a gentle, impersonal memo that hurt my feelings" simply does not qualify), and that the plaintiff must establish that all of those elements were present. Your feels, hurt though they may be, do not affect that conclusion.
Firing someone for their well-intentioned and fairly mild analysis of illegal HR practices (wherein they also made specific constructive suggestions about how to fix those practices) is morally wrong even where it's not per se illegal. Firing someone because they pointed out that the employer is engaged in illegal discrimination is itself illegal. The nationwide response shows that the topic and content is strongly political, which tends to make Google's punishment of Dalmore more suspect under California's protected-category law.
That is unwisely reductionist.
In a very practical sense, Snowball Earth is a harder scenario to escape than Greenhouse Earth. Both have high albedos (due to snow and clouds, respectively), which helps reduce temperature. It's pretty impractical to replace much of the energy contribution of solar loading by burning terrestrial sources of energy: sunlight is too bright, and the Earth has too big a cross-section.
We have great models for the physics and chemistry in human bodies, so why can't we produce an artificial human brain? What makes global climate so much more tractable to simulation than a single human body?