not everywhere has the same barbaric work laws as america, you drooling fucking moron.

in some countries, severance/retrenchment packages are required and defined by law (with employers allowed to offer more but never less than required).

in other countries, like america, some employers offer severance entitlements in their contracts. and, once signed, they ARE a fucking entitlement, not a fucking courtesy. they are part of the agreed-upon compensation package, the same as salary or wages.

and just like the retrenchment laws in places like australia, those contracts will certainly say that severance is not given if you resign or are sacked for cause i.e. your fault, something you did or something you failed to do.

so, yes, employers can and do exploit that by requiring workers to stay on the job long enough to train their replacements.

if it's in the contract, the contract will certainly specify that resigning or being sacked for cause invalidates any severance package.

> Feel free to disprove that by donating deveral hundred dollars to
> Nepali relief efforts. Or any international relief effort for that
> matter.

I did. my partner and I donated $200 each to the oxfam nepal appeal a few days ago.

BTW, we both have zero income, living off savings from previous jobs. me because of ill health, she because she got retrenched in december and has decided to finish her PhD.

yes, that's exactly what you're supposed to think. you're supposed to be consoled by the fact that you'll go to heaven when you die and that'll be better than anything the rich cunts have now. that will more than make up for the shitful life you're living. hallelujah and praise the lord. accept your lot, everyone gets what they truly deserve.

probably because the company threatened the workers' severance packages if they quit or gave them any excuse to sack them: train your replacements and get what you're entitled to or quit and get fuck all.

as with many other abuses of and thefts from workers, this is probably legal. or, at least, ignored by anyone in authority who could investigate and press charges.

> "Nobody's going to hold you up and carry you around..." is a good
> theory only if it applies to all. But it most certainly does not.

it's not a good theory, or practice, even if it did apply to everyone. we live in a society, not some dog-eat-dog nightmare-fantasy hellhole.

"i'm alright, fuck you jack" is not a sustainable ethos for any individual and certainly not for a civilisation. it's a psychopath's creed and psychopaths are at best parasitic on society if not outright destructive to it.

> You want to know why this shit is expensive?

because your health "system" (for want of a better word) is run by and for corporate parasites who will overcharge for everything at every opportunity.

it is not, as you implied, because "undeserving" poor people got treated at your expense - they probably ended up with bills at least as large as yours.

in a civilised country with a decent public health system (i.e. all of the developed world except for the US. and also some of the "third-world" including cuba) a visit to emergency or even a month-long stay in hospital costs the patient exactly nothing, not a single fucking cent. because civilised countries believe that everyone deserves decent health care, not just those with jobs that pay for their health insurance. civilised countries also believe that an employer has no fucking right whatsoever to decide what kind of health care an employee is entitled to. that's just fucking barbaric.

modern windows malware still has a lot to do with insecure design, but not much to do with the stupidity of microsoft developers. stupidity of their managers, perhaps, but not their devs.

the problem is that microsoft management believes that their users are idiots and incapable of understanding or practicing even basic security. whether they are correct or not is irrelevant - either way, that belief leads to them choosing to design for an idiot user's convenience rather than for a normally intelligent user's security.

they don't make insecure software because they're too stupid to do otherwise. they do it because they *choose* to, because they believe their users are too stupid to cope with anything better.

rather than lift their dumber users up to a higher level of understanding and safer practices (i.e. by requiring it in their software design), they dumb things down so that even smarter users find it difficult or impossible to run a secure system. in doing this, microsoft are doing ALL of their users, both dumb and smart, an enormous dis-service. IMO, constituting gross negligence.

not necesarily morons, just slaves to fashionable management ideology.

what's pushing this is the management class's absolute loathing of skilled individuals. they demand that every worker be a replacable component and they simply don't care that that means loss of productivity through loss of experience, skill, and talent.

they have this attitude towards workers in education and every other industry - whether for-profit or not-for-profit. it's what they're taught, and it's what they believe.

he also had the choice to prostitute one of the children so he could send the other to private school. so many free choices available with no coercion involved...isn't life grand!

and if it wasn't for socialist anti-free-market regulations that would be perfectly legal.

The thing is, if you go to a company where everyone works 60 hours a week and you want to work 40, you are fucking everyone else in your team.

no, you are refusing to be fucked along with everyone else.

if you're expected to routinely work 60+ hours then you should be paid for 60+ hours, not 40. note that that implies a 50+% pay increase over the standard 40-ish hour week.

in several jobs i've had over the last decade or so, i've negotiated a three or four day working week because the reduced money is adequate for my needs and I enjoy the extra time for my personal life and pursuits. As a result, I've noticed that one of the nicest things about working less than a full-time job is that when the employer asks you to work extra because some project or job really needs it, they always offer money or time-in-lieu to compensate. they typically don't bother doing that if you're working full-time, they just assume that they can demand more time from you without compensation or even reciprocity.

Of course, if someone asks me what I would like as a starting salary, I'll give an answer. And they rarely ask me that anyway, usually they ask my current salary and then the offer is a bump up over that. But that's not negotiation.

i've found that most employers do ask you what you expect as salary, knowing that most people will under-value themselves.

i'm terrible at negotiations (coz i'm not an extroverted sales-arsehole) but even i know to reflect that question back by asking what's being offered.

about the only thing i am consistently good at in negotiations is gettring rid of any clauses that say that whatever i do (whether in my time or theirs, on my equipment or theirs) belongs to them. I have my own projects and i contribute to various open source projects and i bring my own personal toolbox of tricks and techniques (that i've developed in my own time over many years) in to benefit my workplace - there's no way in hell i'm going to let them own that for any price. i have any clauses like that replaced with clauses that say, in short, that what i do on their time on their equipment is theirs and anything else i do is mine. if they're not willing to agree to that, then they're not the kind of employer i want to work for.

Don't know where you got the "reducing wages" bit in a discussion about tax rates

because the same corporate shills make the same bullshit arguments for lowering wages as they do for lowering taxes. it's all about maximising profit by *whatever* means possible - legal or illegal, ethically or unethically, honestly or dishonestly. the methods don't matter. the lies told don't matter. only the result (increased profit) matters.

But the actual question that started this is whether a company would move to get away from higher taxes, and the clear answer to that is "if they can, of course they will". You can't move the local MickyD, but the company that makes the cups and stuff the MickyD uses can certainly move to a lower tax area. And it is hardly uncommon to hear about a company making a location decision based on tax considerations.

if they're not contributing to the economy by paying their share of taxes, then fuck 'em. if they want to make money in the local economy then they can fucking pay their taxes or fuck off (and hopefully die).

i'm fucking sick of governments giving in to such extortion from corporate parasites - they should just call the bluff and tell them to pay their tax or fuck off.

And it is hardly uncommon to hear about a company making a location decision based on tax considerations.

and the loopholes that allow that should be not just closed but criminalised so that the directors and executives that commit the crimes are not only risking their own personal assets but also gaol time.

Where's the "big lie", again?

the Big Lie is that cutting taxes and eliminating regulations and reducing wages will encourage businesses to employ more people.

this is complete and utter bullshit. All that those things do is increase profit for the business - which they do NOT pass on to consumers and do NOT use to hire more people.

the one and only thing that causes businesses to hire more people is if they have more customers buying so much more of their stuff that their existing employees can not keep up with demand.

and that requires people having money in their pockets to buy stuff with - e.g. numerous studies have shown that, contrary to corporate/libertarian propaganda, raising the minimum wage increases employment because more people are spending more money. ditto for welfare like pensions, unemployment benefit, sickness benefits etc. this money gets spent on daily living requirements and boosts the economy, creates jobs, and gets more people back into paid employment.

no, step 1 is fixing the loopholes that allow them to get away with profit-shifting.

if they sell their product (iphones, advertising, whatever) in australia then they fucking well should pay tax on that income in australia, not singapore and not ireland and certainly not the fucking bahamas.

step 2 is punitive taxation levels for all profits proven to be shifted out of the country - 60% at least. try scamming the ATO with bullshit company structuring, get caught, pay double.

step 3 - start gaoling the fuckers for tax evasion, and make directors and senior execs personally liable for the tax thefts perpetrated by their companies.