Comment Re:tl;dr (Score 1) 712
Wow. Just wow.
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.
If your summary is correct, I hope someone at the school also got a fine for the frivolous call to 911.
Sounds like it wasn't about the theft, it was about being able to charge him with something to show him who's in charge...
If a 6600 used paper tape instead of core memory, it would use up tape at about 30 miles/second. -- Grishman, Assembly Language Programming