Laid off means immediate access to unemployment benefits, no questions asked.

Fired/Terminated means the employer must provide cause for doing so. The onus is on them. If they just fire you "for cause" without giving a reason, then protest your unemployment, you'll probably win.

Quitting means you must provide cause for doing so. The onus is upon you. There are legitimate reasons to quit, including following a spouse out of the area, for example. But if you "just quit" and the employer challenges, you'll probably lose.

Depending on the state, employers can be "dollar for dollar" reimbursable for unemployment, i.e.: They pay the full cost. or they can pay a tax as a percentage of wages, with an "experience rating" that raises the tax if they do a lot of layoffs.

If they are in the latter category and you quit or are fired, they probably won't protest because it doesn't cost them one way or another. If they are in the former category, they have incentive to protest because they pay the full cost of your unemployment checks.

So, yeah, these little technicalities can make a big difference.

I worked for the Department of Employment security, Unemployment Compensation Division and learned the ropes, and also worked as a human resource person and learned the other side.

Not everyone lives in an apartment building in Berkeley, nor is "security" always a technical issue. The day I see cars lined up on the dirt road outside my single family house in the middle of nowhere I'll start worrying. I'm assuming those poor souls who just have to sucker off someone else's feed to save a few bucks are smart enough to stop by Starbucks instead of wardriving the country roads.

Our daughter said to us, "I'm glad you two found each other so you didn't wreck two other peoples' lives."

Of course, she lives where the garbage can is always full, there's never any toilet paper, and it's a 50-50 chance that the toilets are flushed anyway. God, I hate that place!

When I was at UW in the early seventies they had the same sort of "5 year bachelor's" for "disadvantaged" students who got a free ride. I'm sure some of them made out okay, but they had a reputation for smoking dope in class. You can lead a horse to water, but....

Typical left wing response. It is a FACT that spending increased twice as fast as inflation and population growth. You cannot explain that away.

It's ludicrous to claim that because of Microsoft "tax breaks" the state of Washington faces cuts. Washington does not have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem. From 1999 to 2009 the state budget increased 80%. Inflation and population growth combined was 39%. I don't know anyone who can even point to an increase in services provided by the state today compared to 1999. If they had been prudent in their spending they could have accounted for inflation and population growth with half the increase they did.

How did this happen? Lots of special interests, of course, but the basic fuel was sales taxes, which people don't really notice. When people were buying new cars the money rolled in and the state spent it. When the recession hit people cut back spending and suddenly the gravy train of sales taxes slowed to a trickle.

Now the state wants to tax everything because it's "for the children." They're looking for scapegoats and Microsoft is a nice big one to blame. It already has one of the highest sales taxes and gas taxes in the nation. It's a liberal tax and spend state.

But hey. If you want to move where the welfare payments are pretty good, move to Washington, a place where "undocumented aliens" get in-state tuition and help. With policies like Washington it won't be long before this place looks like Detroit.

Yes. It's an oxymoron. It's a mis-use of the term "engineer," equivalent to "Sanitation Engineer" as a title for a garbage truck driver. Engineers are quite capable of becoming excellent software designers, but software designers are nowhere near close to being "engineers."

"they were very, very smart, but not quite in the same league as the Homo Sapiens of Cromagnon."

Apparently these guys are under the impression that Cro Magnon and Homo sapiens were different soecies. Either that or the BBC is "interpreting" the news for us again.

But it's OK to say Japanese cars are well made.

If the package does not fit in the mailbox, USPS puts it by the door. Exactly the same as FedEx and UPS.

It isn't superficial. You KNOW within seconds if this person is a viable candidate or not. Call it intuition, picking up non-verbal queues, or whatever, but you simply do not need a year of "getting to know if we're compatible."

Same with employee interviews.

Show the nerds a beautiful picture and they'll totally miss the point and dissect it to death. Good thing this is not a beautiful naked woman. They'd be complaining that the angle of the elbow isn't quite right and prove it with a mathematical formula.

Even if you donate to the library, they are not obligated to add them to the collection. If a number of your books are pre-ISBN that pretty well guarantees they will not. They need contemporary books people want to read. Unless they are a university or archival library, they are not interested in keeping old stuff. They'll just booksale the stuff they don't want.

librarything.com is a pretty easy way to get your books cataloged. I use it for my collection of over 2,000 books. Calaloging is not just a matter of finding a Dewy number and sticking it on there. MARC (Machine Readable Catalog) is a very intensive and complex method of tagging everything from size to subjects. The neat thing about librarything is that once you get your books in there, with as minimal effort as possible, you can downlad a comma delimited file of the full record to import into any system you want. Cataloging is intensive and time consuming so you want someone else to do the bulk of the work. Don't underestimate the amount of work involved here.

If you REALLY want a serious library automation system there are a couple of open source systems out there: Koha.org is one and Evergreen (open-ils.org) is another. These are real and complex systems with OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog), check-in/out, etc. I wouldn't do this unless you were really hard core.

Google home library software and you will find a ton of stuff.

P.S. I worked in the library automation field for about 30 years as one of the first "systems librarians."

Voted weeks ago. There is a county web site where you can verify your ballot was received. No buttons. No electronics. No chads. It's a blue state, so a waste, but hopefully makes a difference for some of the local races.