This is how I understand it to work from reading an article awhile back on why Disney was vomiting older content all over some of their existing iconic properties. By associating features as trademarks they have the right to stop derivative works that use them but not the original from being distributed. IANAL I don't know how it works it was just something I read.

I recently started working for a Chinese company and frequently get forwarded email conversation in Chinese. I've had zero issues using auto translation. I'll even go so far as saying the auto translate is better then my Chinese peers broken English.

Collusion does not require explicit communication. Implicit agreement is sufficient in many circumstances. Implicit is harder to prove and requires proof of monitoring the market and a feedback specifically for pricing. It's a fine line between right pricing and price fixing. The angle they're probably going to use is if Amazon was only raising those prices and maintaining the raise based off competitors actions their market dominance + price adjusting based off competitors actions could constitute an implicit collusion. IMO it's murky and I don't entirely agree with it, but it's a thing that's a known not allowed.

I don't know what industry you're in, but I'm seeing near constant cuts in my part of tech. Our contracts with almost all of our suppliers dictates that we need to be informed if you're thinking about pending resource actions on teams that we work with. I have a dozen notices for potential cuts before the end of the year. Sometimes the notices just fizzle and there are no cuts, at least no cuts that impact us, but I'm pretty consistently seeing cuts.

Oh it's pretty much the same. No one actually fails. Teachers are forced to come up with extra credit after extra credit. My friend put the study guide for a test up during the test and people still failed. He had to rewrite the study guide so the test was in the same order as the new study guide and people still got stuff wrong.

That's funny. For the sake of others, she was referring to mainly the parents.

I have no clue how a student can fail, at least in my school district, one of the largest in the US. They have study guides for every test, where 80% of the questions are lifted verbatim from the study guide. If they get below an 80, and 80 is a B, they can retake a sometimes identical test. They can then correct the test for 50% credit on the wrong answers. Policy is 10% of the grade is HW, which isn't graded and is just turned in and is often multiple choice. Mathematically if you just randomly guess on the homework, randomly guess on the test which should yield a 25%, use the study guide to correct your answers, you're at a high D. If you can remember just 1 or 2 things you should be able to get a C and the percent of kids failing just goes up every year.

My daughters 3rd grade teacher quit mid-year last year to take the noon shift as the manager of a Sheetz, big fancy gas station, because it paid more, had better benefits, had fewer hours, and had fewer jerks to deal with.

We had some metrics prior to COIVD the big issue is corporate at the higher level really cares about this but once you start moving down levels a lot of management is more concerned with empire building then anything else, so to put it another way, they were really covering for each other. When work from home went into full effect we could really see what people were doing because they were all working from a single point and they couldn't use pair programming or other covering excuses depending on their role. We had an idea of the numbers prior but to put it in legal terms it was all circumstantial until work from home made it all direct.

This is a big company problem more then a small or startup problem because the organizational structures made it easy to hide. Many of the mangers who were enabling or ignoring this were cut as well.

It really depends on the state. I've seen three scenarios.
1. Get cut, get severance, get UI as soon as you can after your last official work day.
2. Get cut, get severance, get UI as soon as the equivalent weeks of severance passes, and collect severance for total number of weeks.
3. Get cut, get severance, get UI as soon as the equivalent weeks of severance passes, but only for a number of weeks equal to weeks of UI - weeks you got severance.
Some of it really comes down to how the severance was written. In NC if they say, your severance is equal to 15 weeks pay or $x, you can't apply for UI until those 15 weeks are up. If they say you get $x without saying equal to y weeks pay, you can apply for UI right away.

Before and during covid I was head or analytics for a Fortune 500 company. I was in charge of the team that tracked a host of information and did analysis, pipeline, revenue, sales effectiveness, social, engineering effectiveness, among many others. It was clearly evident after a couple months into COVID that there were drastic changes in productivity almost all for the negative. Bugs increased, KLOC decreased, milestones slipped, entire releases were cancelled and merged because it would have been embarrassing to announce releases with almost no updates. We brought this up to management and we were first told to double check everything and explore metrics that looked good. After we did that and found little positive we were told to bury it all while the CEO was praising how effective everyone was working from home. Post vaccine the company quickly switched to a limited model encouraging certain groups to return, until they shifted into almost a full return to office hybrid work mode, x days in y days home. It was at that time they decided to start eliminating huge swaths of people it was determined did almost nothing during lockdown and now that they were identified appeared to do only slightly more at the office. We saw a marked improvement in productivity for many return to office people. The net is people fell into a few groups maintain/slightly up in productivity at home vs work, dropped significantly between office and home (the largest cohort), and didn't seem to really do anything ever. So my view is some people work fine from home, I've been working from home for almost 20 years. The largest group really needs an office to keep them on task, and the last group just does nothing, ever, ( which looked to be about 20% and half of them were cut), after which our total productivity and per employee productivity went up significantly. I compared notes with analytics wonks in other companies with whom we frequently exchange ideas and offer help and they all saw numbers that told similar stories and were told to keep it hush. Some other things we found/thoughts: Most companies can probably cut 30% of their staff and productivity would go up. Most people put in far fewer then 40 hours. The number putting in 50-60, is very low. The number of people that look to be working multiple jobs was SO much higher then I ever thought. The number of people constantly looking for new jobs was SO much higher then I ever thought. The amount of stuff people do on their work laptops, where we can see and track most everything is painfully high.

I'm sure there are a lot, but from my recent job searching experience many of the jobs that say remote really mean pick an office. I started going down the interview path with multiple companies and after awhile they went we said remote, but we really want you to relocate to . For many they said it wouldn't necessarily rule me out, but preference really would be going to people willing to report to an office. Once when I asked why did you list remote? The answer was if you're Bill gates you can work remote, everyone else really needs to be in an office.

You can totally wear a costume. I did. You just can't wear a mask and there are a few rules on face painting. People did take dozens of pictures with us.

I've used it multiple times, and for what I've used it for I've been very impressed. I got a ticket with extenuating circumstances. Every lawyer I called said, yup, shouldn't have gotten a ticket, but too hard to fight, pay me to get a prayer for judgment, a zero point every 3 year option in NC. I used DoNotPay and got the ticket dropped with one trip to court.

Yesterday I flew from Atlanta and the TSA precheck had these kiosks. While I was waiting to get called up I asked what the cameras were for, they described what's here. I asked what if I don't want my picture taken, I was told I would have to leave TSA pre-check and go through general screening. If I wanted to talk to a manager I would have to go to a TSA screening office to chat.

If you read the actual TSA documents there are so many weasel words its not even funny. We'll only save information and only for 2 years during evaluation periods.
Well when is an evaluation period.