I think it comes from the tax paid by the company, actually.

At any rate, I have no problem with part of my tax money being used to ensure people aren't screwed over. Of all the things tax money goes into, this one seems very reasonable to me.

No, they don't lose. France isn't the US. The AGS guarantees the employees will get paid.

I don't know how things are in France since I can't read French, but I checked the Spanish regulations for that.

In Spain if the company is insolvent there is a public organization that will pay the severance you're owed.

So no, there really isn't a problem. Neat, isn't it?

If they had been paid, I don't think they could have won a lawsuit asking to be paid.

Sure, it's a net win. The assets will be sold, and the employees will be paid their severance package. They also get paid for unused vacation days, and after the vacation days are over they also get paid unemployment benefits.

You seem to be suggesting that failing to pay what is owed to some (and maybe more than the initially laid off people if they would have run out of money later anyway) would somehow have been better.

The most likely reason why they got sued and lost is because they screwed up something related to the layoffs.

My impression is that in Europe people are generally less litigious than in America, but the employment laws have big, sharp teeth and it's very unwise for employers to try to ignore them.

If that was it, they didn't have much left to live. Sure, if you ignore laws and costs, you can make a business profitable that otherwise wouldn't be, but you don't get to ignore what you owe.

Now I'm not familiar with the laws in France, but in general I expect this was something like not paying a severance package, or not giving adequate advance notice. Those things are part of doing business and any employer should know about them. You can't just pretend they don't apply to your company.

This is wrong. As is the use of the word "troll" in the summary/article. Trolls and shills are distinct, and the difference isn't whether they get paid. You can be a paid or unpaid troll and a paid or unpaid shill.

Trolls post messages written specifically to generate responses. The term derives from fishing where trolling means to drag something through the water to catch fish. Internet trolls post baiting comments trying to get people to respond to them. Flamebaiting is a subset of trolling, where the aim is to generate angry responses.

Shills post messages to talk up some product, service, etc., trying to make it look good and its competition look bad.

Both categories also assume that the writer likely doesn't fully agree with what he or she is writing. If two people write the same words but one believes them while the other doesn't, the former is not a troll or shill, but the latter may be.

Note that paid trolls are pretty common on the Internet, but they tend to write the articles (or, on /., the summaries) not the comments. "Clickbaiting" is almost the same as trolling in this respect, except that a clickbait article is to collect clicks, while a troll article is intended to generate comments.

But really should be "Don't Read the Summary", since the summaries frequently get edited into incomprehensible trollishness.

I'm not convinced that your sentence isn't perfectly grammatical, but I'm not enough of a grammar nazi to diagram it. :)

Of course, and the same is true for me. However, I'm not average, and I suspect you aren't either.

If one of my more-average peers worked just as hard as I do and tried to get my job, it is unlikely that they would be hired. They're just not as capable of doing what I do for a living.

That doesn't make them any less valuable. It just makes them less employable.

I don't think it is anybody's responsibility to hire them. They should simply be given enough to live on somewhat comfortably, without having to work.

Most simply aren't employable, no matter how hard they try.

The average kid in my high school class could barely grasp algebra. There are still a few good-paying jobs for people like this, but they're rapidly being eliminated, and only the most senior can hold them down. The ones who make a decent living tend to be exceptional in some way. That might be how well they communicate, how nice they look, how athletic they are, etc. However, it seems to me that average kids these days end up working retail for a wage that isn't even survivable without public assistance.

Of course nobody is going to walk up to them and offer them a well-paying job. It is also true that anybody hiring somebody for a well-paying job is unlikely to hire most of the folks you were complaining about.

Most people performing tasks that are replaceable by automation will not be capable of performing any job which is not also replaceable by automation. Of course, some will be, but that minority is unlikely to be unemployed.

Actually, I am asserting that they're disabled, though not in any form that currently is granted a disability pension in most societies. The disabilities vary, but they're mostly mentally disabled, in the sense that their intelligence is not fairly well above-average, which is what is required to obtain a well-paying job. Granted, there are also many well-paying jobs that depend less on intelligence and more on other attributes, but for the most part those attributes are also fairly rare.

Take somebody who is completely paralyzed and unable to move, and also completely mentally retarded and unable to do more than maybe digest food spooned into their mouth. They lie on one end of a continuum. On the other end would be somebody with the intelligence of Steven Hawking and the prowess of an Olympic athlete. Virtually everybody falls somewhere in-between. At all points in time there has been a boundary below which people were simply unemployable. As technology advances, that line moves - people who were perfectly employable 1000 years ago are not employable today, because the jobs they were able to do are automated. For example, somebody who was mentally disabled and unable to even remember their name might still be able to earn a living wage by digging ditches 500 years ago. Today that would be unlikely - there is so little demand for manual labor that employers looking for such work can be more picky about who they hire.

At some point in time automation will get to a point where no human is employable - we'll simply be weaker and dumber than machines.

First, I said "well-paying jobs" and not "jobs." I'm not interested in how many average people can hold down a minimum wage job. Such persons are going to require the public assistance you seem to be decrying in any case.

From my observation, it does not seem like most average kids are getting well-paying jobs these days. With the general advance of technology it seems likely to me that the bar for getting a well-paying job will continue to rise, as it should. It doesn't make sense to hire people to do work that a machine can do more efficiently. The problem isn't with the fact that many are unable to work productively, but rather with those who insist that they should be punished for this perfectly normal condition.