For what it is worth, I am the employer.

I have had about 12 people resign in the past year. 3 Joined up to start a new company, 3 went to work for one competitor, 2 sought better pay, 2 had similar issues to pay (commute), and the remaining two made quality of life moves.

While only the three were real assholes about it, all twelve were technically disgruntled.

For the record, as a "nerd," I fully understand how to completely invade the privacy of my employees. I consider those actions unethical. They are entitled to be disgruntled, and I need to understand when they are unhappy and do my best to address it. Reality is that people that have a honest need to change, but value their employment handle things differently. They communicate well in advance of two weeks notice, and they provide options for both parties. They are not afraid of being treated like outsiders; they are still invested in mutual success.

There is this concept about burning your bridges. Being that person that just leaves without notice might catch up to you.

I had to give four months notice for a job; that is absurd. Two weeks keeps options open. Employees are also eligible for unemployment insurance, while employers don't have "cog insurance". Employees can dispute wrongful dismissal. The balance of power is much more equal than most people realize, until you get up to companies with over 5,000 employees or so.

From a liability standpoint, if you have a departing employee doing anything important and things go wrong then you are in big trouble. I saw one company go bankrupt in a week after a departing employee was overseeing a critical cut-over that resulted in an outage, and I have had problems with a departing employee putting out a crap product just because he didn't care anymore.

HR over reacts, but they are playing it safe.

Moreover, from past experience, there are a significant number of people that resign and provide "proper" notice that have plans to compete against said former employer. The really maniacal ones start about a year before they leave, and shift communications to personal email addresses and phone numbers, and in innocuously start using a Box account for confidential information.

They have also likely copied everything off the servers they might want in the future.

Pretty much everyone that quits feels like they have been wronged by their employer, and their new employer will make everything right.

A prudent approach though is to ensure logging of all activity, in case things do come down to a lawsuit. I don't think that level of logging is ethical for active employees, but having the ability to do it is very useful.

The other thing that should be considered is a reviewer of any outgoing emails.

Autocorrect seems to make their there's worse. They're not always at fault.

Per California ISO, which may not be representative of global production, and using yesterday's data we have:
Source / Peak MW / Daily Production MWh
Solar Thermal / 543 / 2,759
Solar PV / 5,164 / 48,086
Wind / 2,366 / 25,584
Small Hydro / 199 / 3,615
Biogas / 206 / 4,716
Geothermal / 1,058 / 25,120
(Source: http://www.caiso.com/market/Pa...)

Solar PV has over twice the peak capacity and just under twice the total production.

I tried Texas' ERCOT, but they don't have as good of breakdowns. Their wind production is about half of California's at 1,359MW.

Much of the issue (misconception) is smaller wind turbines. However, by definition a wind turbine is working hard to absorb most of that inertia into the generator, so there is variability on an individual machine level. The overall grid smooths things out. The complaints I have been hearing are that power flow direction and magnitude can change sharply with the wind turbines, creating challenges for the protective relays.

Sodium Sulfur batteries work great on a diurnal basis, but they seem less effective in short-term cycles, much like most battery technologies.

On the wind side there are substantial additional costs over dispatchable sources; they might not be borne by the wind farm traditionally, but it seems to be increasing.

Photovoltaics are absolutely fantastic for distributed generation at a building level. Solar thermal is great for grid-scale power generation. Photovoltaic is not a great grid-scale solution precisely because it is a good DG solution.

Wind only works at grid scale. The power formula simply favors the largest turbine, mounted with the hub as high as possible. That does not work for distributed solutions.

What does not seem to be resolved today is how to actually connect 2-5MW wind turbines to the grid without negatively impacting grid stability.

There are likely easy paths and harder paths in. If you can't put a malicious CD or USB stick in and take control, you hit one level. If you can't plug a device into a port under the hood that can take over control, that is another hurdle. Ultimately though, you need to keep the system secure from the OnStar and its ilk being an attack vector. From fairly credible reports, this is not the case.

USB-C in and of itself is likely OK (not nearly as robust as Lightning though); my main complaint is not at least having a standard USB port available on the power brick to allow for using some existing dongle while charging.

No, it heralds the beginning of another cycle of replacing various dongles and endless cables, much like what will happen when USB-C is eventually replaced with a standard that can accommodate 5K or 8K displays, more power, etc., which would generally be anticipated in about 3-4 years.

It wouldn't be that big of a deal to me, except for the fact that I need at least three sets of adapters for home, office, and weekend place, and ideally a fourth set for my travel bag. Between Ethernet, VGA, DVI, HDMI, USB, and SD this seems like a mess for me.

But what really pisses me off is that none of my USB receptacles that I have hard-wired in will work with the power requirements for the USB-C devices.

Spratley islands is a long way from last communications-- the middle of the gulf of Thailand. The oil rig worker sighting makes me wonder if it really did go down there, but it doesn't make any sense either.

The biggest advantage in my book is simplifying inheritance issues. For taxes, it doesn't become an issue until you have more than $100k income per year; the paperwork is fairly easy to file up until you have (guessing) about $250k income. At that point, the offsets become important and you need to be more careful. Although it was 10 years ago, when I was last living abroad the forms only took an hour max to complete, due to actual tax liability in the US based on no local income taxes.

It all really depends on what the kids want to do. Having two passports is pretty nice for a wide variety of situations, if you like to travel or want to live in another country for a long time without proper paperwork...

You are doing it wrong. The idea (with Bruce Protocol) is that it should take you 10 minutes to get up to your maximum; if you go longer that is better, shorter is worse.