I've spent the better part of the last five years as a supervisor for a telecommunications company dealing with attendance and administrative records. One of the topics that comes up frequently is FMLA. By federal minimums, an employee has to have been working for a full year, full time, and have a doctor's claim to a long term illness in order to qualify for FMLA. In addition, the doctor sets the guidelines for what the employee can do with the FMLA including how many days can be taken consecutively, per week or month, or other conditions as determined by the condition. For most people, even having a serious illness that might require two or three weeks of downtime would likely not be able to complete the FMLA paperwork in time to have it effective by the time they were terminated for non-attendance. FMLA is great when you have a sick relative, or when you find out you have a long-term illness like AIDs or cancer, but often doesn't work for run-of-the-mill illnesses, even when it seems like it should.

Why would I think of "British Petroleum" as an "American company?" They are traded on the London Exchange, not the NYSE.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that "conspiracy to commit a crime" is in fact a crime. If you could "prove" intention to commit murder through google searches about how to accomplish the task, I think this could be viewed as a crime in and of itself.

I currently work for a third party handling AT&T mobility calls. A lot of what you say is true, or near enough to true, but in particular: "However management failed representatives quality score if they proactively disabled the ewallet." I'm sure you are talking about mobile purchases, and while I'm not sure how old your information is, we currently advise our agents to remove up to 90 days of charges if and only if the customer agrees to a mobile purchase blocker. The real problem is that most of the time, users are on smartphones. More than half the time, these are now Android devices. Of those calls, about half of them are set up to bill to mobile for app purchases. Even free apps (apps costing $0) are blocked by the mobile purchase blocker, because the system is still trying to authenticate the ability to purchase, even for no money. Once the check fails, customers cannot download their apps, and there is another call from the customer demanding that we "fix the Google app store." Usually in these cases, as a shortcut, reps will still offer the credit, cancel the subscription, but no protection is added to avoid this coming up again the next time Junior falls for the same scam.

I think the larger problem with capitalism in general is that it is very easy to leverage your wallet when the only concern is money, and corporations generally have much larger wallets than it's consumers. Unions were considered a Good Thing (TM) back when laws did not exist to protect workers, as the only way to influence the collective wallet of a large employer was to stop making products for that employer to sell on a collective basis. At this point, it seems like the best way to stop getting screwed by corporations on the consumer side would be to create a "consumer union," wherein members agree to stop buying services or products from businesses with a particularly bad model as long as the majority in the union agree that the model is bad. Of course, some consumers won't care, but part of a union is agreeing to make some short term sacrifice in order to achieve a greater good.

There was an article a few months back about how every time a new technology comes out, people cry, "Oh noes! This will surely ruin our civilization due to [insert one or more of the following: Information overload; lack of memory retention; decreased social and family values; increased violence; etc.]. This has been going on since the written word in Greece, when Socrates said that writing everything down would stop people from trying to remember things and therefore be the end of civilization. We can all see how badly that turned out.

The real problem will come when the automatic advertisements start selecting the GP for targetted gun adds.

23 dollars per 1000 is 2.3%. That is roughly half of 5%, and an amount I would call "anywhere near."