> And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic.
I know it sounds like an oversimplification, but "got off on a technicality" is a common thing among the well-connected and well-heeled. Sure, us nerds probably focus too much on the "technicality" part, since we are by definition technical, but the rest is wishy-washy, unfair BS as far as many of our brains work much of the time.
"Get off on a technicality" is largely police propaganda. The "technicality" tends to be the police violated their rights in some way or did something illegal.
And if you get to trial (without being coerced into a guilty plea for something you may not have done [1]), the cops will lie constantly in police reports and even on the stand. It happens so often it has a name: testalying [2].
The well-connected don't really get off on a "technicality". They simply never get charged in the first place. Only two people were ever charged because of Jeffrey Epstein. One is Epstein, who died, and the other is Ghislane Maxwell who got convicted of trafficking minors to... nobody in particular... and is now in a low-security work camp it's technically illegal for sex offenders to be in.
And even if somehow you, as a connected person, are charged and convicted, well you just buy a pardon [3].
Poor performers get put on PIPs, right? Did that person's poor performance "ruin it for everyone" and put the rest of the working plebs (the entire company or department or whatever) on PIPs? No, of course not. The poor performer gets singled out, which is just fine.
So instead of punishing everyone for some lying asshole's poor judgment, I propose management puts that lazy jerk on their own SDIP (sick day improvement plan).
EDIT: As an alternative, sure, update the handbook's sick policy while that liar is working for you. Since there's now precedent for handbook updating, should be an easy thing to revert it back to the normal, "no sick day policy" after they leave (by whatever means).
> The poor performer gets singled out, which is just fine.
he's not a poor performer, he's just an asshole. And you can't fire someone for being an asshole
> So instead of punishing everyone for some lying asshole's poor judgment, I propose management puts that lazy jerk on their own SDIP (sick day improvement plan).
You're missing the point. You can't single the person out for violating a policy that you didn't have written down. The only reason that policy is now written down is because that person violated the policy. Singling out someone for being (genuinely) ill is likely to end up with you on the wrong end of an employment tribunal who will ask you "what is your sickness policy"
In the USA, unless they have a contract, you can definitely fire someone for being an asshole.
If you have any sense whatsoever, you'll simply say "we've decided not to continue your employment" and offer them a month of paid COBRA and two weeks of pay in exchange for an agreement not to sue.
This is a false argument. Regulations are effective. When was the last time you breathed in second hand smoke while eating dinner? Or inhaled lead from a passing car? Or asbestos from your neighbor's new house?
The moat is the leverage to get licensing deals using the size of the existing user base.
You could bootstrap a movie rental business by buying DVDs from a DVD store (then eventually from a DVD distributor, etc.). You cannot bootstrap a movie streaming business by buying streaming rights because nobody will sell them to you. They hardly even sell them to Netflix anymore.
The Internet Archive tried to get around the same issue for ebooks by scanning physical books and renting the scans (and not being a business), and it nearly cost them everything.
basic people sure, but the early internet showed an extremely strong demand for a better service than cable TV. When that demand is there then people will start seeking other options and building bridges of convenience to help the basic people also port over.
Same results for me. Absolutely awful, vision consistently began failing by becoming noticeably blurry about 8 to 9 hours after taking night lenses out, and I couldn't drive at night because of headlight and streetlight halos even after "topping off" with those uncomfortable lenses during the day. As an enthusiastic night sky observer, trying to use those lenses was depressing.
I gave up after extended tries with three different lenses (I think it was six to nine months total), with my highly experienced doctor consulting with different manufacturers and researchers from around the country. Turns out my pupils naturally open up too wide, made worse by corneas that apparently are not thick enough to retain the reshaping all day. These issues, incidentally, make me ineligible for the popular cut-n-burn style of eye surgery.
On the bright side, it was indeed completely reversible and I've suffered no effects of any kind after about two days of non-use. That was a bit over a decade ago.
Not completely unheard of but I get your point :). Babylon 5's pilot's animations (and I believe opening credits) was rendered in 1993 on sixteen souped-up A2000s, each with 32 MB of RAM.
That's pretty cool. I know 32 megs was technically possible with the right boards, I just didn't know any normal person that had one. I had an A3000 with 5 megs (4 megs fast, 1 megs chip) and I thought it was bad ass for the time.
CyberstormPPC was $1000 when it came out in 1997. Thats more than Pentium 200, good motherboard, case, sound card, graphics and 3Dfx accelerator. 128MB was $400-800 and not even top end systems shipped with that much.
Huh - that seems a very basic missing feature in the cloud version. We use bog-standard self-hosted JIRA and markdown editing is basic working functionality. People also add mermaid diagrams/charts to the issue. As well as custom diagram plugins, excel sheets and a whole gamut of documents.
I know it sounds like an oversimplification, but "got off on a technicality" is a common thing among the well-connected and well-heeled. Sure, us nerds probably focus too much on the "technicality" part, since we are by definition technical, but the rest is wishy-washy, unfair BS as far as many of our brains work much of the time.
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